Valentine Blacker
Valentine Blacker CB (born in Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1778 - died in Calcutta, India, 4 February 1826), was a lieutenant colonel in the Honourable East India Company and later Surveyor General of India.
He obtained a commission in the Madras Cavalry in 1798, was made a cornet in 1799, and aide-de-camp to a Colonel Stevenson in the Wayanad district in 1800, and quartermaster-general in 1810. He served in Deccan, 1817, and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. He published a history of Maharashtra War, including discussion of the Battle of Khadki. He also authored a popular and widely anthologized poem on military service, Oliver's Advice,[1] originally published under Blacker's occasional pseudonym, "Fitz Stewart".[2]
Following the death of his predecessor, William Lambton, Blacker was made surveyor-general of India, stationed in Calcutta from 1823 until his death from a fever in 1826 (some accounts report 1827, but his gravestone reads 1826).[3] Andrew Waugh said of him that "Blacker, with the exception of Col Everest, was the ablest and most scientific man that ever presided over this expensive department".[4] He was buried in Calcutta.
He and his brother William Blacker both wrote pseudonymously, and the two are sometimes confused or conflated in texts.
[edit] Publications
- Memoirs of the operations of the British Army in India during the Mahratta war of 1817,1818 and 1819 (London 1821).
[edit] References
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- ^ Charles Gavan Duffy, The ballad poetry of Ireland, 4th ed. (1845), p. 83.
- ^ John O'Hanlon, The Poetical Works of Lageniensis [pseud.] (1893), p. 140.
- ^ Clements Robert Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (1878), p. 96.
- ^ J. R. Smith, Everest: The Man and the Mountain (1999), p. 226.
- Macrae, Stuart (2004). "Blacker, (Latham Valentine) Stewart". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31907. Retrieved 15 December 2010.
[edit] External links
- Lieut.-Col. William Blacker From The Dublin University Magazine, Volume 17, Number 101, May 1841
