ton, who had received the K.C.B. in 1903, was given the task of dealing with this fanatic. His expedition (1903-1904) was successful, and on returning to India he was promoted full general and took over command of the Secunderabad division.
In 1907 Egerton was appointed a member of the council of India, a post which he held until his retirement in 1917. His long and varied military experience in India, especially on the frontier, and in expeditions beyond its borders, gave him a position of great authority on the many political and military questions which engaged four successive secretaries of state during that period. He was much interested in, and assisted much in carrying out, the various military reforms of Lord Kitchener. In recognition of his services he was raised to the grade of field-marshal. After his retirement he lived at Christchurch, Hampshire, where he died 20 February 1921. Like many whose services have been rendered on the outposts of the Empire, Sir Charles Egerton was little known to the mass of his fellow-countrymen; but his work will endure.
He married in 1877 Anna Wellwood (died 1890), daughter of James Lawson Hill, of Edinburgh; by her he had three sons.
[Official records; The Times, 22 February 1921.]
ELGIN, ninth Earl of (1849-1917), statesman and viceroy of India. [See Bruce, Victor Alexander.]
ELLIOT, GILBERT JOHN MURRAY KYNYNMOND, fourth Earl of Minto (1845-1914), governor-general of Canada and viceroy of India, was born in London 9 July 1845. He was the eldest son of William Hugh Elliot, third earl, by his wife Emma, daughter of Sir Thomas Hislop, first baronet [q.v.]. He had ancestral connexions with India, both on his father’s and on his mother’s side of the family. His great-grandfather, Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards first Earl of Minto [q.v.], was an able and vigorous governor-general of India. His mother’s father had commanded the Deccan army in the Marquess of Hastings’s Pindari and Maratha war. Elliot, bearing the courtesy title of Viscount Melgund, was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was in his youth a noted gentleman jockey, riding several times in the Grand National and winning the Grand Steeplechase de Paris in 1874. He held a commission in the Scots Guards 1867-1870. During the next twelve years he led a curiously adventurous life, playing a part in many wars in many lands. In 1871 he witnessed the street fighting of the Paris commune. In 1878, as war correspondent to the Morning Post, he was with the Carlist army in the north of Spain. In 1877, at the outbreak of war between Russia and Turkey, he at once started for Constantinople, became assistant attaché under Colonel Lennox to the Turkish army and saw the Russian bombardment of Nikopolis and the passage of the Danube that followed. In 1879 Melgund, volunteering for service in the second Afghan War, was attached to the staff of Sir Frederick (afterwards Earl Roberts in the Kurram valley, and it was only the pressure of private affairs, necessitating a return home, that kept him from attending Sir Louis Cavagnari [q.v.] on his ill-fated mission to Kabul. In 1881 Roberts took Melgund with him as private secretary, when he was sent out to South Africa to take up the work of Sir George Colley [q.v.] after the defeat of Majuba. But on their arrival, finding peace concluded, they returned to England. In the Egyptian campaign of 1882 Melgund was attached to the mounted infantry, was wounded at Mahuta, and subsequently commanded the regiment in the march into Cairo. Then he turned from the East to the West, and from 1883 to 1885 acted as military secretary to the governor-general of Canada, Lord Lansdowne. When the North-Western rebellion broke out in 1885 under Louis Riel [q.v.] he went to the front as chief of the staff with General Middleton, and was present at the battle of Fish Creek. In 1886 he failed to gain election as liberal-unionist candidate for the Hexham division of Northumberland. Then followed a quiet period of twelve years spent mostly on his Roxburghshire estate in local and county work—especially in promoting the efficiency of the volunteer service. He succeeded to the earldom in 1891 on the death of his father.
The most important part of Minto’s career was yet to come, and after this interlude of comparative ease he held in succession, without any appreciable break between the two periods of office, the governor-generalship of Canada and the viceroyalty of India. As governor-general of Canada (1898-1904)—a position requiring many of the qualities that grace a constitutional monarch—Minto was happily placed. His geniality, directness, and natural shrewdness, his reputation as a soldier and a sportsman, his unaffected manners, all made him very popular, and, in consequence, thoroughly
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