Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Colvile, James William
COLVILE, Sir JAMES WILLIAM (1810–1880), judge, eldest son of Andrew Wedderburn Colville of Ochiltree and Crombie in Fifeshire by his wife, the Hon. Louisa Mary Eden, daughter of William, first lord Auckland, was born in 1810, and was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained the third place in the second class in mathematical honours, and graduated B.A. in 1831 and M.A. in 1834. He was an intimate friend at Cambridge of Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton. In Hilary term 1835 he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple, and practised in Lincoln's Inn as an equity draughtsman. In 1845 the influence of his friend Lord Lyveden, then president of the board of control, procured him the appointment of advocate-general in Calcutta to the East India Company. In 1848 he became a puisne judge, and in 1855 the chief justice of the supreme court of Bengal. He was knighted in 1848, and in 1859 retired and returned to England. He acquired in India a great knowledge of Indian systems of law, and of scientific and economic questions affecting India, and was president of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta. On his return home he was at once on account of these special attainments sworn of the privy council, and acted with Sir Laurence Peel as Indian assessor to the judicial committee. In November 1865 he was appointed a member of that committee, and took a large share in its decisions, and in 1871, under the Judicial Committee Act, was appointed one of the four paid judges. He continued to act in that capacity until on 6 Dec. 1880 he died suddenly at his town house, 8 Rutland Gate, and was buried on the 11th at his Scotch seat, Craigflower, near Dunfermline in Fifeshire, of which county he was a justice of the peace and deputy-lieutenant. He was a bencher of the Inner Temple, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He married in 1857 Frances Elinor, daughter of Sir John Peter Grant, K.C.B., G.C.M.G., of Rothiemurchus, lieutenant-governor of Lower Bengal, by whom he had one son, Andrew John Wedderburn, born in 1859, who died in 1876.
[Times, 8 Dec. 1880; Law Times, 11 Dec. 1880.]