William George Maxwell: A Biographical Note

Ed. Note: Most scholars have manuscripts in their files that for one reason or another never made it into print. JMBRAS occasionally provides an outlet for these orphan works in a section called An Article I Never Published.

This issue features an article prepared by John M. Gullick (1916-2012), who was one of the most prolific contributors to JMBRAS in the post-war era. (See JMBRAS 72 pt. 2, 1999: J.M. Gullick Festschrift issue). At the time of his death in 2012, his papers included several unpublished works, some of which have been published posthumously. The following article on W. G. Maxwell was prepared as the Foreword to a new edition of Maxwell’s In Malay Forests. In the event, the new edition was never published, but Gullick’s Foreword, with minor editorial changes, seems worthy of publication in its own right.

William George Maxwell (1871–1959) was always referred to as George Maxwell to distinguish him from his father, Sir William Edward Maxwell, who was known as Sir William. Father and son were members of a family that for three generations held high office in the Straits Settlements and later in the Malay States. Whether by nature or nurture, or perhaps both, George Maxwell was a man in this family tradition, and so it may serve to introduce him.

The first Maxwell to arrive in Malaya was (Sir) Peter Benson Maxwell (1816–93) who as a London barrister became a member of the commission appointed to investigate the scandal of British military hospitals in the Crimean War, only partly improved by the efforts of Florence Nightingale. As is the way with official committees its report blamed no one. Benson Maxwell, however, supplemented it with a pamphlet entitled Whom shall we hang? The British establishment rid itself of this tiresome figure by giving him a colonial judgeship, and the satirical magazine, Punch, observed that 'Whom shall we hang has gone to Penang'.

As a judge in the Straits Settlements (1856–71) Benson Maxwell delivered some notable decisions and quarrelled publicly with a couple of governors, but earned the respect of local litigants by his practice of inspecting the property on the ground before giving a decision. He rose to be Chief Justice and retired in 1871, but later expressed his disapproval of British intervention in the Malay states in a book sarcastically entitled Our Malay Conquests (1878).

William Edward Maxwell (1846–97) arrived in 1865 at the age of 18 and reached the peak of his Malayan career as acting governor in the mid-1890s, before moving on to the governorship of the Gold Coast. He too was a formidable personality of whom one of his officials, when he was Resident of Selangor, said that going up to the Residency was like attending the headmaster's study at school to be caned. But he was a fair-minded autocrat and on occasion a kind man. His legacy to Malaya is the National Land Code, derived from his introduction to Malaya from South Australia of the Torrens system of registered title to land. He was one of the most brilliant expatriate Malay scholars of the colonial period, and first made his reputation with A Manual of the Malay Language (1882), including an essay on the Sanskrit element in Malay, that astonished his contemporaries. He also wrote definitive studies of Malay debt-bondage and land tenure and was one of the founders in 1877 of the Straits (now Malaysian) Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. His wife—George's mother—was the daughter of the colonial chaplain (resident Anglican clergyman) of Penang, whose graciousness somewhat offset her husband's asperity. He cannot have seen much of his children in their youth, but he was not a heavyhanded Victorian paterfamilias.

George Maxwell, born on 9 June 1871, was the eldest of six sons. His brother Charlton Maxwell also made a career in Malaya as an administrator. The third brother, Eric Maxwell, founded the Ipoh law firm that survives to this day as Maxwell...