Frederic Thesiger, 1st Viscount Chelmsford

• 1. Introduction

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  Frederic John Napier Thesiger, 1st Viscount Chelmsford, died on the 1st of April 1933. The Brisbane Courier called him "a man who, above all things, desired to be a true servant of the people." That tribute sits alongside a career of genuine controversy. He governed two Australian states in succession. He served as Viceroy of India during some of its most turbulent years. He accepted a cabinet post from a Labour prime minister while remaining, to the end, a lifelong Conservative. Born on the 12th of August 1868 in London, he was the son of the 2nd Baron Chelmsford and Adria Heath. He died at 64 from coronary vascular disease. His route to vice-regal office ran through the common rooms of Oxford, a cricket field, and a London courtroom.

• 2. An Oxford Formation

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  Magdalen College, Oxford, awarded Chelmsford first-class honours in law in 1891. He was then elected a fellow of All Souls College, a position he held from 1892 to 1899. In 1893, he was called to the Bar of the Inner Temple to practise law. He also joined the army volunteer force, serving as an officer in the 1st volunteer battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment. He was promoted to captain on the 13th of September 1902. Cricket ran alongside all of this: he captained the Oxford eleven and played county cricket for Middlesex. He served on the London County Council from 1904 to 1905 and returned as an alderman from 1913 to 1919. When his father died on the 9th of April 1905, Chelmsford succeeded as the 3rd Baron Chelmsford. In July 1905, he accepted appointment as Governor of Queensland and was sworn in at Brisbane on the 20th of November.

• 3. Queensland's Constitutional Standoff

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  On the 26th of June 1906, Chelmsford was invested as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. It was early recognition for a term about to become far more contentious. Three parties had emerged in the Queensland lower house in nearly equal numbers. Following the 1907 election, William Kidston, who had founded his own party, became Premier with Labor support. The Queensland Legislative Council was an appointed chamber. It refused Kidston's legislative programs on electoral reform and wage-fixing. Kidston asked Chelmsford to appoint enough new members to break the deadlock. Chelmsford refused, arguing that Kidston lacked a sufficient mandate from the people for such a step. Kidston resigned in protest. Chelmsford then commissioned the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Philp, to form a ministry. Philp's government was defeated in the assembly almost immediately. Chelmsford granted Philp a dissolution even though parliament was barely six months old. When Kidston denied Supply, Chelmsford used the reserve powers to ensure it was passed until the election.

  Kidston won the 1908 election and returned to office. The new assembly passed a motion criticising Chelmsford's action. Speculation mounted that he would be recalled, though nothing came of it. The Colonial Office acknowledged that their representative had been mistaken in granting the dissolution, yet kept him in favour. His term expired just as Kidston resigned from the Labor Government and formed a coalition with Philp's Conservatives.

• 4. Music and Mandate

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  Charles Wade of the Liberal Reform Party was Premier when Chelmsford was sworn in as Governor of New South Wales at Government House on the 28th of May 1909. After the 1910 election, Wade's Liberals fell and James McGowen led the state's first Labor Government. Chelmsford formed a genuine friendship with Labor Attorney General William Holman, built around a shared love of music. Chelmsford was a competent viola player. He encouraged chamber concerts at Government House. He put his view of McGowen's ministry on the record. "I have never had a body of Ministers with whom it has been a greater pleasure to work," he said. "They are quiet, unassuming and industrious, and have won the goodwill and loyalty of their departments."

  Between the 21st of December 1909 and the 27th of January 1910, Chelmsford served as Administrator of the Commonwealth while the Governor-General was on leave. He was away in England from April to November 1911, attending King George V's coronation alongside Premier McGowen. This left William Holman as acting Premier in New South Wales. Two Labor members of the lower house had then resigned over land reform, leaving the government in a minority. Holman asked the Lieutenant Governor, Sir William Cullen, to prorogue parliament until by-elections could be held. Cullen declined. A protracted exchange of refusals followed. Cullen eventually recommissioned Holman and granted him a dissolution. Holman held on tenuously, losing one seat in the by-elections. Chelmsford returned to find the Legislative Council still deeply skewed. It held only five Labor members out of 73. As a result, the government lost 70 percent of house divisions in its first three years in office. He approved 11 appointments to the council in 1912, yet Labor was still left with only 13 members out of 59. In October 1912, he announced he would not seek a further term. The Colonial Office described him as "careful, hardworking and popular." He left for England in March 1913.

  A Freemason, he was elected Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of New South Wales in 1910, a post he held until 1913. In 1909, Freemason Lodge Chelmsford 261 had been established in the state in his honour. In 1912, he was invested as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George. He would serve as Chancellor of that Order from 1914 to 1916, a period that began the same year Britain went to war.

• 5. Viceroy at a Turning Point

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  Upon the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Chelmsford rejoined his regiment and was posted to India. On the 29th of February 1916, he was appointed to the Privy Council. Within weeks he was named Viceroy, succeeding Lord Hardinge. He was invested as a Knight Grand Commander of both the Order of the Indian Empire and the Order of the Star of India in 1916. On the 4th of December 1917, he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.

  Edwin Samuel Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, came to India at Chelmsford's urging to examine reform in person. Educated Indians had been pressing consistently for greater self-government throughout Chelmsford's tenure, a demand he broadly agreed with. Together, Chelmsford and Montagu oversaw the Reforms that bore both their names, giving greater authority to local Indian representative bodies. Trying to hold a line between expanding Indian authority and maintaining British control, Chelmsford also passed repressive anti-terrorism laws. Those laws drew fierce opposition from Indian reformists and sparked unrest across the Punjab. Martial law was imposed in the region. On the 13th of April 1919, General Reginald Dyer ordered troops to fire on an unarmed crowd at Amritsar. Chelmsford was initially supportive of Dyer. When a ruling condemned Dyer's actions, Chelmsford eventually disciplined him. Indian nationalists considered the response too little, too late. The Indian National Congress boycotted the first regional elections in 1920.

  The same period saw the Third Anglo-Afghan War and the beginning of Gandhi's first major campaign. Chelmsford returned to Britain on the 15th of June 1921 and was elevated as 1st Viscount Chelmsford of Chelmsford, County of Essex. His eldest son, Lieutenant Frederic Ivor Thesiger of the 87th Brigade Royal Field Artillery, had died in the same years. He was killed in action in Mesopotamia on the 1st of May 1917.

• 6. An Unlikely Ministry

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  Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour government in 1924, and he turned to Chelmsford, a lifelong Conservative, to serve as First Lord of the Admiralty. Labour had too few peers in the House of Lords to fill all its ministerial posts. Chelmsford agreed on conditions: the Royal Navy's size would be maintained, and he would not attend cabinet meetings of a political nature. He never joined the party. He was sworn in by King George V on the 23rd of January 1924 at Buckingham Palace. He was appointed as a Commissioner exercising the office of Lord High Admiral three times that year. The dates were the 1st of April, the 15th of August, and the 9th of October 1924. He had also chaired the Miners' Welfare Committee under the Mining Industry Act of 1920. He served on the royal commission on mining subsidence in 1923-24. The government fell in November 1924.

  Chelmsford had married Frances Charlotte Guest on the 27th of July 1894 at St. George's Church, Hanover Square. She was the daughter of Ivor Guest, 1st Baron Wimborne, and Lady Cornelia Henrietta Maria Spencer-Churchill. They had six children together. Their daughter Joan married Sir Alan Lascelles in 1920. Their daughter Anne married Donough O'Brien, 16th Baron Inchiquin in 1921. Their younger son, Andrew Charles Gerald Thesiger, born on the 25th of July 1903, would later succeed as 2nd Viscount Chelmsford. Lady Chelmsford was made a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in 1917.

  In 1926, Labour Premier Jack Lang of New South Wales appointed Chelmsford as Agent-General for New South Wales in London. The state needed a senior representative there to press its case. Disputes with Governor Dudley de Chair over the abolition of the Legislative Council were ongoing. Lang said the state needed someone "in close touch with the London financial market." Chelmsford served in that role until 1928. Birmingham University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Law in 1927. Magdalen College, Oxford, gave him an honorary Doctor of Civil Law in 1929. In 1932, he was appointed Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, closing a connection to that institution begun four decades earlier as a young fellow.

  He was the first cousin of the actor Ernest Thesiger and the uncle of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who was born in 1910. In the 1982 film Gandhi, the role of Lord Chelmsford was played by Sir John Mills. The New South Wales government had launched a Sydney Harbour ferry called Lady Chelmsford in 1910, named in their joint honour. She worked the harbour until 1971. She then became a cruising restaurant in Melbourne. She sank at her moorings in February 2008 and was broken up underwater in mid-2011, seventy-eight years after the man whose family name she carried.