which was completed after his retirement. He also designed the necessary works for widening the Strand and for the construction of the thoroughfares of Aldwych and Kingsway connecting it with Holborn. In 1897, on the completion of the Blackwall tunnel, he was knighted.
On the termination of his engagement with the County Council, Binnie commenced private practice at Westminster. In 1906 he reported to the government of Ireland on the Bann and Lough Neagh drainage, and from 1905 to 1907 he acted as chairman of the viceregal commission on the arterial drainage of Ireland. He visited Malta in 1909 in order to report on the water supply. In 1910 and 1911 he reported on the water supply and drainage of Petrograd, and in 1913 on the water supply of the city of Ottawa.
Binnie became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1865, and was elected president in 1905. In 1913 he published an important work on Rainfall Reservoirs and Water Supply, based on lectures which he had delivered at the request of the Chadwick trustees. A few years before his death, which took place at Beer, Devon, on 18 May 1917, an illness necessitated the amputation of one of his legs. He was buried at Brookwood cemetery. He married in 1865 Mary (died 1901), daughter of Dr. William Eames, physician, of Londonderry, by whom he left two sons and three daughters.
[The Times, 19 May 1917; Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, vol. cciii, 1916-1917; private information.]
BIRDWOOD, Sir GEORGE CHRISTOPHER MOLESWORTH (1832-1917), Anglo-Indian official and author, the eldest son of General Christopher Birdwood, Indian army, by his wife, Lydia Juliana, daughter of the Rev. Joseph Taylor, of the London Missionary Society, was born at Belgaum in the Bombay Presidency 8 December 1832. His family had long been connected with the Indian army and public services. He was sent at the age of seven to England to be educated, and went first to the Plymouth new grammar school, then to the Dollar Academy, and finally to the university of Edinburgh where he took his M.D. degree. In 1854 he was appointed to the Bombay establishment of the Indian medical staff, and he took part as a naval surgeon in the Persian expedition of 1856-1857. During the following ten years, whilst practising in Bombay and holding professorships of anatomy and physiology
and of botany and materia medica at the Grant medical college, he laid the foundations of his future work by devoting himself to the study of many unexplored aspects of Indian life, social, economic, and scientific. He was registrar to the newly founded university of Bombay, curator of the government museum, secretary to the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and one of the founders of the Victoria botanical gardens and the Victoria and Albert museum at Bombay. His manifold activities in Bombay, which found recognition in his appointment as sheriff of the city in 1864, were cut short by ill-health, and he returned to England in 1868, as he told his friends, to die, but in fact, only to begin a long career of valuable service as an interpreter to his own countrymen of Indian life, art, and culture, and as a friend to Indians, for whom he aimed at promoting opportunities of social and intellectual intercourse with England. He was special commissioner of the Bombay government for the Paris exhibition of 1867; and, after he had recovered his health at home, he was appointed to assist Dr. John Forbes Watson [q.v.] in the annual exhibitions at South Kensington, of which the first was held in 1871. In 1878 he was posted as special assistant in the statistics and commerce department of the India Office, and he was in charge of the Indian sections of the chief international exhibitions down to that of Chicago in 1898. He retired from official work in 1902.
Birdwood’s literary output both before and after his retirement was enormous, but the bulk of it was in the somewhat scattered form of reports, papers in the transactions of learned societies, contributions to magazines and newspapers, and introductions or appendixes in the books of others. The range of his writings was as wide as his interests. He was an authority on Indian art—more so perhaps than on Indian philology and etymology, in which he sometimes gave free rein to his whimsical imagination and love of paradox, though he was an accomplished Sanskrit scholar. To the study of Indian life and Indian folk-lore he brought a store of recondite information and solid learning. Besides special treatises on Indian botanical subjects, his two most important works were his Report on the Miscellaneous Old Records of the India Office (1879), and The Industrial Arts of India (1880); perhaps his most characteristic work is the volume of essays, entitled Sva (1915), giving to the mystic
46
