Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, (2 April 1807 – 19 June 1886) was an English civil servant and colonial administrator. As a young man, he worked with the colonial government in Calcutta, India. He returned to Britain and took up the post of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury. During this time he was responsible for facilitating the government's response to the Great Famine in Ireland. In the late 1850s and 1860s, he served there in senior-level appointments. Trevelyan was instrumental in reforming the British Civil Service in the 1850s.
Today Trevelyan is mostly remembered for his reluctance to disburse direct government food and monetary aid to the Irish during the famine due to his strong belief in laissez-faire economics.A History of Britain, Simon Schama, 2001 Trevelyan's defenders say that larger factors than his own acts and beliefs were more central to the problem of the famine and its high mortality.
Origins Descended from an ancient family of Cornwall, he was born in Taunton, Somerset, a son of the Venerable George Trevelyan, then a Cornish clergyman, later Archdeacon of Taunton, the 3rd son of Sir John Trevelyan of Nettlecombe Court in Somerset. His mother was Harriet Neave, a daughter of Sir Richard Neave , Governor of the Bank of England.
Much of the wealth of the family derived from the holding of slaves in Grenada.
Education He was educated at Blundell's School in Devon, at Charterhouse School and then the East India Company College at Haileybury in Hertfordshire. R. A. C. Balfour wrote, "his early life was influenced by his parents' membership of the Clapham Sect – a group of sophisticated families noted for their severity of principle as much as for their fervent evangelism." Trevelyan was a student of the economist Thomas Malthus while at Haileybury. His rigid adherence to Malthusian population theory during the Irish famine is often attributed to this formative tutelage.Laura Trevelyan, A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and their World. I.B. Taurus, 2006, p. 25
Career
In 1826, as a young man, Trevelyan joined the East India Company as a writer (clerk) and was posted to the Bengal Civil Service at Delhi, India. There, he achieved rapid promotion. He occupied several important and influential positions in various parts of India, but his priggish and often indiscreet behaviour endeared him to few of his colleagues and involved him in almost continual controversy.
On return to Britain in 1840 he was appointed as assistant secretary to HM Treasury, and served to 1859, during both the Irish famine (18451852) and the Highland Potato Famine (18461857) in Scotland. In Ireland, he administered famine relief, whilst in Scotland he was closely associated with the work of the Central Board for Highland Relief. His inaction and personal attitude towards the Irish people are widely believed to have slowed relief for the famine. In discussing policy for the Highland Potato Famine on 20 September 1846, Trevelyan wrote: "The people cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve." The italics appear in the original document. This repeats language used in April of the same year in respect of Ireland:Our measures must proceed with as little disturbance as possible of the ordinary course of private trade, which must ever be the chief resource for the subsistence of the people, but, coûte que coûte (at any cost), the people must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve. In Ireland a million people starved to death, as the Irish watched with increasing fury as boatloads of homegrown oats and grain departed on schedule from their shores for shipment to England. Food riots erupted in ports such as Youghal, near Cork, where people tried unsuccessfully to confiscate a boatload of oats. At Dungarvan, in County Waterford, British troops were pelted with stones as they shot into the crowd, killing at least two people and wounding several others. British naval escorts were then provided for the riverboats.
In contrast, in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, whilst there was great hardship, the high death rate seen in Ireland did not occur. Extensive relief efforts from outside the Highlands were effective in limiting deaths due to famine. The overall problem of Highland communities that could not generate enough food or income with which to feed themselves was ultimately solved by emigration.
He was cofounder in 1851, with Sir John McNeill, of the Highland and Island Emigration Society which during the second phase of the Highland Clearances supported an exodus of nearly 5,000 people to Australia between 1851 and 1858.
Trevelyan was Governor of Madras from 1859 to 1860, and Indian Finance Minister from 1862 to 1865. A reformer of the civil service, he is widely regarded as the founder of the modern Civil Service.
Marriages and issue He married twice: Firstly on 23 December 1834, in India, to Hannah More Macaulay (d. 5 August 1873), daughter of Zachary Macaulay and Selina Mills, sister of Lord Macaulay, then a member of the supreme council of India and one of his closest friends. By his first wife he had one son and heir: Margaret Jean Trevelyan (1835 - 1906), married Henry Holland, 1st Viscount Knotsford. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet (1838–1928), the statesman. Alice Frances Trevelyan (1843-1902) married William Stratford Dugdale (1828-1882), son of William Stratford Dugdale. Their son was Sir William Francis Stratford Dugdale, 1st Bt. Secondly on 14 October 1875 he married Eleanor Anne Campbell, a daughter of Walter Campbell of Sunderland and a granddaughter of Walter Campbell of Shawfield in Scotland.
Biography India He entered the East India Company's Bengal civil service as a writer in 1826, having displayed from an early age a great proficiency in Asian languages and dialects. On 4 January 1827, Trevelyan was appointed assistant to Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, the commissioner at Delhi, where, during a residence of four years, he was entrusted with the conduct of several important missions. For some time he acted as guardian to the youthful Madhu Singh, the Rajah of Bhurtpore. He also worked to improve the condition of the native population. He abolished the transit duties by which the internal trade of India had long been fettered. For these and other services, he received the special thanks of the governor-general in council. Before leaving Delhi, he donated personal funds for construction of a broad street through a new suburb, then in course of erection, which thenceforth became known as Trevelyanpur.
In 1831, he moved to Calcutta, and became deputy secretary to the government in the political department. Trevelyan was especially zealous in the cause of education, and in 1835, largely owing to his persistence, government was led to decide in favour of the promulgation of European literature and science among the Indians. An account of the efforts of government, entitled On the Education of the People of India, was published by Trevelyan in 1838. In April 1836, he was nominated secretary to the Sudder board of revenue, an office he had held until his return in January 1838.
Role in the Irish Famine On 21 January 1840, he entered on the duties of assistant secretary to Her Majesty's Treasury in London, and discharged the functions of that office for nineteen years. In Ireland, he administered the relief works of 1845–47, when upwards of 734,000 men were employed by the government during the Great Famine. Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in little more than a decade (1845–55). On 27 April 1848, Trevelyan was appointed as a KCB in reward of his services.
The Great Famine in Ireland began as a catastrophe of extraordinary magnitude, but its effects were severely worsened by the actions and inactions of the Whig government, headed by Lord John Russell in the crucial years from 1846 to 1852. Many members of the British upper and middle classes believed the famine was a divine judgment—an act of Providence—although these views also existed in the Irish Catholic Church. A leading exponent of the providentialist perspective was Trevelyan, who was chiefly responsible for administering Irish relief policy throughout the famine years. In his 1848 book The Irish Crisis, he called the famine "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil", namely Ireland's rural economic system of exploitative landlords and peasants overly dependent on the potato. The famine, he wrote, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected... God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part and we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain." This mentality was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions. Historians disagree about Trevelyan's exact role in famine relief policy in Ireland. Karen Sonnelitter discusses the subject in her edited collection of primary sources, The Great Irish Famine: A History in Documents.
During the Great Famine, specifically 1846, the Whig–Liberal Government held power in Britain, with Trevelyan acting as treasurer. In this position he had considerable influence over the parliament's decisions, especially the plans for the relief effort in Ireland. Along with the Whig government, he believed Ireland needed to correct itself and that a laissez-faire attitude was the best solution. Though his efforts produced no remedy to the situation, he believed that if the British government gave Ireland all that was necessary to survive, the Irish people would come to rely on the British government instead of fixing their problems.
In 1846, Trevelyan ordered the Peelite Relief Programmes, which had been operating since the early years of the famine, to be shut down. This was done on 21 July 1846 by Sir Charles Wood. Trevelyan believed that if the relief continued while a new food crisis was unfolding, the poor would become permanently conditioned to having the state take care of them.
After the end of the Peelite Relief Programs, the Whig–Liberal government instituted the Labour Rate Act, which provided aid only to the most severely affected areas of the famine. This Labour Act took time to be implemented, as was Trevelyan's intention, allowing the British government to spend the bare minimum to feed those starving from the famine. He was nicknamed as "linchpin of relief operations". Trevelyan believed that labourers should have seen this as a happy event to take advantage of what he called "breathing-time" to harvest their own crops and carry out wage-producing harvest work for large farmers. But the return of the blight had deprived labourers of any crops to harvest and farmers of agricultural work to hire labourers for.
Trevelyan expressed his views in letters that year to Lord Monteagle of Brandon and in an article in The Times. But in 1846, more than ninety percent of the potato crop had been destroyed. The large crops of oats and grain were not affected, and if those crops had been distributed to the Irish people rather than exported, mass starvation could have been avoided.