The Dewsbury Chronicle, and West Riding Advertiser. — 1872-02-17 (Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, England)

THE ASSASSINATION OF LORD MAYO.  In Tuesday's Daily Chronicle we gave a brief telegraphic account of the murder of Lord Mayo, Governor-General of India. His lordship will be well remembered by the readers of the Chronicle as Lord Naas, he having been chairman of the Election Committee which enquired into the return of the late Col. Crosland as member for Huddersfield. The telegram announced that on Thursday night last (the Bth inst.), the Governor-General of India had been assassinated at Port Blair, the celebrated convict settlement on the Andaman Islands, at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal. At the time of the tragic occurrence his lordship was engaged in one of the extensive tours of observation by which his administration has been distinguished. He had not long returned from the Camp of Exercise at Delhi, where he attended the military manoeuvres carried out under the direction of the Commander-in-Chief when he started to pay a long-contemplated visit to the distant province of Burmah. His voyage to Rangoon, in the flagship Glasgow, was extended southward as far as the Andaman Islands, that he might personally inspect the penal establishment at Port Blair, which constitutes one of the great social questions of India. It was founded in the year after the mutiny for the reception of Sepoy rebels, but it subsequently outgrew this special design, and became a general destination for the worst class of criminals. The assassin, Shere Ali, had been sent thither three years ago under sentence of transportation for life for a murder committed in the year of the mutiny. According to the telegram the Viceroy had finished his inspection of the several stations, and in the dusk of the evening was on his way back to his boat, when he was stabbed twice in the back before his guards could seize the assassin. He did not survive many minutes, and the man-of-war which had been conveying him to Rangoon returned at once with his dead body to Calcutta. The news was forwarded to London from the first telegraph station accessible, that on the small island of Saugos, at the mouth of the Hooghly. _  The deceased nobleman Was only in his 50th year, having been born at Dublin in 1822. Richard Southwell Bourke was the eldest son of the fifth Earl of Mayo, whom he succeeded .as sixth earl in 1867. He was educated at Trinity College, and in early life he evinced the taste for travelling, which grew upon him throughout his career. A Russian tour which he accomplished as a young man afforded him materials for a work on "St. Petersburg and Moscow." In his 25th year he successfully contested one of the seats in county Kildare in the Conservative interest. This he held from 1847 till 1852, when he exchanged it for Coleraine. In the same year he entered Lord Derby's first administration as Chief Secretary for Ireland, a honour which his Conservative colleagues reassigned to him on two later occasions. His official career at home was thus almost exclusively identified with Ireland. His third term of the Chief Secretaryship in 1866-8 fell within the shadow of that great crisis in Irish affairs which the country is still living through. His negotiation with the Roman Catholic Bishops about the creation of a Catholic University was one of the final misadventures of the Government of 1866. A few months later (August, 1868) his appointment to the Viceroyalty was . announced. He sailed for Bombay on the eve of the retirement of Mr. Disraeli's Ministry, and on the 20th December he landed in India, almost simultaneously with Lord Napier's return to his post, after the Abyssinian expedition. On the 12th January, 1869, he and Lady Mayo were received in state in Calcutta. His Viceroyalty has consequently lasted a little over three years.