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Birth of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings

Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings, Anglo-Irish politician and military officer, is born on December 9, 1754, at Moira, County Down. As Governor-General of India, he conquers the Maratha states and greatly strengthens British rule in India.

Rawdon-Hastings is the son of John Rawdon, 1st Earl of Moira, and Elizabeth Hastings, 13th Baroness Hastings, who is a daughter of Theophilus Hastings, 9th Earl of Huntingdon. He is baptised at St. Audoen’s Church, Dublin, on January 2, 1755. He grows up in Moira and in Dublin. He attends Harrow School and matriculates at University College, Oxford, but drops out. While there, he becomes friends with Banastre Tarleton.

He joins the British Army on August 7, 1771, as an ensign in the 15th Regiment of Foot. With his uncle Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, he goes on the Grand Tour. On October 20, 1773, he is promoted to lieutenant in the 5th Regiment of Foot. He returns to England to join his regiment, and sails for America on May 7, 1774.

He serves in the American Revolutionary War (1775–81), first seeing action at the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill. He is rewarded with an English peerage in 1783. He succeeds his father as Earl of Moira in 1793. When the Whigs come to power in 1806, he is appointed Master-General of the Ordnance, a post he resigns on the fall of his party in 1807. Taking an active part in the business of the House of Lords, he belongs to the circle of the Prince of Wales (later George IV), through whose influence he is appointed Governor-General of India, on November 11, 1812. He lands at Calcutta (Kolkata) and assumes office in October 1813. Facing an empty treasury, he raises a loan in Lucknow from the nawab-vizier there and defeats the Gurkhas of Nepal in 1816. They abandon disputed districts, cede some territory to the British, and agree to receive a British resident (administrator). For this success, in 1817 he is raised to the rank of Marquess of Hastings together with the subsidiary titles Viscount Loudoun and Earl of Rawdon.

He then has to deal with a combination of Maratha powers in western India whose Pindaris, bands of horsemen attached to the Maratha chiefs, are ravaging British territory in the Northern Sarkars, in east-central India. In 1817, he offers the Marathas the choice of cooperation with the British against the Pindaris or war. The Peshwa, the Prime Minister of the Maratha Confederacy, the raja of Nagpur, and the army under Holkar II, ruler of Indore, chose war and are defeated. The Pindari bands are broken up, and, in a settlement, the Peshwa’s territories are annexed, and the Rajput princes accept British supremacy. By 1818 these developments establish British sovereignty over the whole of India east of the Sutlej River and Sindh. Rawdon-Hastings also suppresses pirate activities off the west coast of India and in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. In 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles, under his authority, obtains the cession by purchase of the strategic island of Singapore.

In internal affairs, Rawdon-Hastings begins the repair of the Mughal canal system and brings the pure water of the Yamuna River (Jumna) into Delhi, encourages education in Bengal, begins a process of Indianization by raising the status and powers of subordinate Indian judges, and takes the first measures for the revenue settlement of the extensive “conquered and ceded” provinces of the northwest.

Rawdon-Hastings’s competent administration, however, ends under a cloud because of his indulgence to a banking house. Though he is cleared of any corrupt motive, the home authorities censure him. He resigns and returns to England in 1823, receiving the comparatively minor post of Governor of Malta in 1824. He dies at sea off Naples on November 28, 1826, aboard HMS Revenge, while attempting to return home with his wife. She returns his body to Malta, and following his earlier directions, cuts off his right hand and preserves it, to be buried with her when she dies. His body is then laid to rest in a large marble sarcophagus in Hastings Gardens, Valletta. His hand is eventually interred, clasped with hers, in the family vault at Loudoun Kirk.

In 1828, two years after Rawdon-Hastings’s death, members of the India House, to make some amends for their vote of censure, give £20,000 to trustees for the benefit of Hastings’s son.

(Pictured: “Portrait of Francis Rawdon, 2nd Earl of Moira, later 1st Marquess of Hastings (1754 – 1826)” possibly by Martin Archer Shee, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland)


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Birth of Robert Gibbings, Wood Engraver & Sculptor

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Robert John Gibbings, Irish artist and author most noted for his work as a wood engraver and sculptor, and for his books on travel and natural history, is born into a middle-class family in Cork, County Cork on March 23, 1889. Along with Noel Rooke he is one of the founder members of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920 and is a major influence in the revival of wood engraving in the twentieth century.

Gibbings’ father, the Reverend Edward Gibbings, is a Church of Ireland minister. His mother, Caroline, is the daughter of Robert Day, Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and president of The Cork Historical and Archaeological Society. He grows up in the town of Kinsale where his father is the rector of St. Multose Church.

Gibbings studies medicine for three years at University College Cork before deciding to persuade his parents to allow him to take up art. He studies under the painter Harry Scully in Cork and later at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Central School of Art and Design.

During World War I Gibbings serves in the Royal Munster Fusiliers and is wounded at Gallipoli before eventually being invalided out of the army in 1918. He then resumes his studies in London.

Gibbings is very much at the centre of developments in wood engraving. He is a founder member and leading light of the Society of Wood Engravers, which he sets up with Noel Rooke in 1920. In 1922 he contributes two wood engravings, “Clear Waters” and “Hamrun,” to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Gerald Duckworth & Company and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. In 1923 he receives a commission for a set of wood engravings for The Lives of Gallant Ladies for the Golden Cockerel Press, his most important commission to date at 100 guineas.

Gibbings is working on the wood engravings The Lives of Gallant Ladies when Hal Taylor, the owner of the press, becomes very ill with tuberculosis and has to put it up for sale. He seeks a loan from a friend, Hubert Pike, a director of Bentley Motors, to buy the press. He takes over in February 1924 and owns and runs the press until 1933.

Gibbings illustrates numerous books on travel and natural history, including Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, and writes a series of bestselling river books, notably Sweet Thames Run Softly. He does a huge amount to popularise the subject of natural history, travelling extensively through Polynesia, Bermuda and the Red Sea to gather inspiration for his work.

Gibbings is the first man to draw underwater, the illustrations filling his Penguin classic Blue Angels and Whales. He is one of the first natural history presenters on the BBC.

In September 1955 Gibbings and his wife, Patience, purchase Footbridge Cottage, a tiny beehive of a cottage in Gibbings’s words, in Long Wittenham on the banks of the River Thames. Life there suits him, and he has a period of tranquility that he had not known previously. They live there until he dies of cancer in an Oxford hospital on January 19, 1958. He is buried in the churchyard at Long Wittenham. The grave is marked by a simple headstone featuring his device of a crossed quill and graver, carved by Michael Black, a young sculptor who is a friend of Gibbings.