Papers of Ronald Brymer Beckett, High Court Judge at Lahore

Blog series Untold lives

Author John O'Brien, India Office Records

A recent acquisition to the India Office Private Papers has now been catalogued and is available for researchers to view in the British Library’s Asian and African Studies Reading Room. The collection consists of the papers of Ronald Brymer Beckett (1891-1970), Indian Civil Service 1914-1946, High Court Judge at Lahore, and later art historian.

Ronald Beckett was born on 17 January 1891 in Rawdon, Yorkshire. His father managed in a firm of silk and wool merchants and his mother was a schoolteacher. He attended a number of schools, and at one point was the only boy in a girl’s school in Bournemouth due to an attack of measles. He excelled at school and went on to continue his studies at Lincoln College, Oxford. On graduating from Oxford, he joined the Indian Civil Service and spent most of the next 32 years in India. In October 1946, he retired from the ICS and returned to England where he began a new career as an art historian. Beckett was a very creative person, and the collection contains a few of the poems he wrote, and a volume of sonnets dedicated to his wife Norah.

Much of Beckett’s early life is captured in his unpublished memoirs, which he wrote in the 1940s. The memoirs describe his childhood, his school days, studying at Oxford, living in London following graduation and a trip to Ireland. He also wrote in detail about the history of his family, the Murrays and the Anderson Clan.

Beckett joined the Indian Civil Service in 1914, arriving in India in November of that year to take up the post of Assistant Commissioner in the Punjab. Over a long career in India, he held a number of important posts, including guardian to the Nawab of Mamdot, and even spent a year in London at the India Office working on sections of the 1935 Government of India Act. However, he spent most of his ICS career in Lahore where he held various judicial posts including as a Judge in the High Court. The collection contains a few items relating to this period, including some correspondence and most interestingly printed papers relating to appeals which came before him at the Lahore High Court relating to cases of murder, divorce, land and property disputes, Municipal taxation, and the appointment of a guardian for a minor.

In 1919, Beckett held the post of City Magistrate in Amritsar and found himself caught up in the civil unrest which spread through the city at the beginning of April. There had been two general strikes known as hartals, and although peaceful the organisers had been arrested, with rioting subsequently breaking out across the city. Beckett wrote an account of his experiences during this time, when he was called upon to hold back a large hostile crowd with only three garrison gunners as support, and later escorting civilians to the Fort to escape danger. Beckett’s wife Norah was also in the city during the riots and wrote her own account which was published in Blackwood’s Magazine.

Further reading

Papers of Ronald Brymer Beckett (1891-1970), Indian Civil Service 1914-1946, High Court Judge at Lahore, Mss Eur F776 – a paper catalogue of the contents is available to consult in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room.

A summary of Beckett’s career in the Indian Civil Service can be found in The India Office and Burma Office List 1947 (London: HMSO, 1947).

Beckett, E., 'Beckett, Ronald Brymer (1891–1970)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: 2004) https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/45949 (requires login).