James Thomason

The son of Thomas Truebody Thomason, a British cleric in Bengal from 1808, and his first wife Elizabeth Fawcett, he was born on 3 May 1804 in Little Shelford. He was educated in England from 1814, at Aspenden Hall School, Hertfordshire, where he knew Thomas Babington Macaulay, living with his paternal grandmother Mrs Dornford, and Charles Simeon.[1] Simeon, in Cambridge, his godfather and effective guardian, gave him a great deal of attention.[2]

In 1818 Thomason became a pupil in 1819 at Stanstead Park, near Racton in Sussex, of George Hodson, who was tutoring Albert Way, son of Lewis Way in what became a small class of six boys that included Samuel Wilberforce.[1][3][4] He moved on to Haileybury College.[1]

Thomason returned to India in 1822. He held numerous positions there, including magistrate-collector, settlement officer in Azamgarh (1832–37), and foreign secretary to the government of India (1842–43). In 1843 he was named Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces, a post he held for ten years. By 1853 he had also established a system of 897 locally supported elementary schools in centrally located villages that provided a vernacular education for children throughout the region. He was appointed as governor of Madras by Queen Victoria, but did not survive to assume the post.[5] He died on 27 September 1853, at Bareilly, India, where he was staying with Maynie Hay, his married daughter.[1]

James Thomason Building at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Thomason proposed that a civil engineering college be established at Roorkee. The college, now the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, was founded in 1847. It gained university status in 1949[6] and was declared an institute of national importance in 2001 by the then HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi. The main building was renamed to James Thomason Building in his honor by an act of the Board of Governors of the institute in December 2013, and a road on campus also bears his name.[7]

• The India List and India Office List. Harrison. 1819.
• Richard Temple (February 2006). James Thomason — Lieutenant-Governor. Rulers of India series. Read Books. ISBN 978-1-84664-413-9.