Richard Strachey
Sir Richard Strachey Mountstuart Duff | |
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Personal details | |
Born | First Anglo-Sikh War | 24 July 1817
Sir Richard Strachey
Early life
He was born on 24 July 1817, at
Career
Strachey served in the
In 1848, with J. E. Winterbottom, he entered Tibet to explore Lakes
From 1858 to 1865 he was chiefly employed in the public works department, either as acting or permanent secretary to the
During this period the entire administration of public works was reorganised to adapt it to the increasing magnitude of the interests with which this department had to deal since its establishment by Lord Dalhousie in 1854. For this reorganisation, under which the accounts were placed on a proper footing and the forest administration greatly developed, Strachey was chiefly responsible. His work in connection with Indian finance was important. In 1867 he prepared a scheme in considerable detail for decentralising the financial administration of India, which formed the basis of the policy afterwards carried into effect by his brother Sir John Strachey under Lord Mayo and Lord Lytton.
He left India in 1871, but in 1877 he was sent there to confer with the government on the purchase of the
In 1892, Strachey attended the
Strachey's scientific labours in connection with the geology,
Strachey did much good work for the Royal Society, served on its council four times, from 1872 to 1874, 1880 to 1881, 1884 to 1886, and 1890 to 1891, and was twice a vice-president ; he was a member of its meteorological committee (which controlled the meteorological office) in 1867, and he was a member of the council which replaced the committee in 1876, and from 1883 to 1895 was its chairman. From 1873 he was on the committee of the Royal Society for managing the Kew observatory. The royal medal of the society was bestowed upon him in 1897 for his researches in physical and botanical geography and in meteorology, and the Royal Meteorological Society awarded him the Symons medal in 1906. His most important scientific contributions to knowledge were made in meteorology. He laid the foundations of the scientific study of Indian meteorology, organising a department whose labours have been of use in assisting to forecast droughts and consequent scarcity and of no little advantage to meteorologists generally. For years he served on the committee of solar physics. A sound mathematician, Strachey delighted in mechanical inventions and especially in designing instruments to give graphic expression to formulas he had devised for working out meteorological problems. In 1884 he designed an instrument called the 'sine curve developer' to show in a graphic form the results obtained by applying to hourly readings of barograms and thermograms his formula for the calculation of harmonic coefficients. In 1888 and 1890 he designed two 'slide rules,' one to facilitate the computation of the amplitude and time of maximum of harmonic constants from values obtained by applying his formula to hourly readings of barograms and thermograms ; the other to obtain the height of clouds from measurements of two photographs taken simultaneously with cameras placed at the ends of a base line half a mile in length. A further invention was a portable and very simple instrument, called a 'nephoscope,' for observing the direction of motion of high cirrus clouds, whose movement is generally too slow to allow of its direction being determined by the unaided eye.[5]
Personal life
Strachey was about 37 years old when he married Caroline Bowles, who died in 1855, within a year of their wedding.
Nearly four years were to pass before he married again. On 4 January 1859, the 42-year-old Richard married 18-year-old
- Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey) (1865–1960), wife of French painter Simon Bussy; she wrote exactly one novel, Olivia, about a lesbian relationship
- suffragistand feminist
- WWII. His wives were Ruby Mayers and the feminist Ray Costelloe Strachey(1887–1940).
- Pernel Strachey (1876–1951), scholar and educationist; principal of Newnham College, Cambridge
- Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), writer and thinker; among his prominent works are Eminent Victorians and a celebrated biography of Queen Victoria
- Marjorie Strachey (1882–1964), Newnham graduate and author
- James Strachey (1887–1967), psychoanalyst and biographer of Sigmund Freud; husband of psychoanalyst Alix Strachey (1892–1973)
See also
Notes
- ^ Bombay engineers according to Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (2005).
- ^ Holdich, T. H. (1908) Obituary: General Sir Richard Strachey, GCSI, FRS, LLD. The Geographical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Mar. 1908), pp. 342–344.
- ISBN 978-0-8131-9100-3.
- ^ "Colonel Strachey". The Bombay Gazette. 27 December 1870. p. 2.
- ^ "Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement".
- ^ Rita McWilliams Tullberg, ‘Strachey, (Joan) Pernel (1876–1951)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 6 March 2017
Other sources
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Vetch, Robert Hamilton (1912). "Strachey, Richard". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Strachey, Sir Richard". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 976. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
- Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (2005) The Financial Foundations of the British Raj. Orient Longman. ISBN 81-250-2903-6.
- Barbara Caine (2005) Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family. ISBN 0-19-925034-0.