The Times/1937/Obituary/Mr. Alan Butterworth

Layout 2

Mr. Alan Butterworth

Indian civilian and author

Mr. Alan Butterworth, C.S.I., who died in London on Tuesday at the age of 72, was one of those members of the Indian Civil Service who interested themselves in researches into the past. They are less numerous to-day than in the more leisurely mid-Victorian period. Epigraphy and geology were his chief studies, but there were many other fields in which he delighted to wander.

A son of Mr Henry Butterworth, of Rochdale, he was born on July 25, 1864. He was educated at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, went to Wren's to be coached for the Indian Civil Service examination of 1883, and to Balliol College, Oxford for his probation. He reported at Madras at the end of 1885, and served in various executive, judicial, and administrative capacities in the Southern Presidency. He also saw some judicial service in the Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces.

He collaborated with a Madrasi scholar in a volume on the inscriptions on stones and copperplates in the Nellore district; wrote a book on "Some Madras Trees" and another on "The Formation of Madras." In 1912 he was appointed to membership of the Board of Revenue but left it in the following year to be Chief Secretary to the Madras Government. He was made C.S.I. in 1915, and retired three years later. A book he published in 1923, "The South-Lands of Siva," showed him to be be a keen observer of the Indian scene, and a light-hearted, gossipy, joking narrator. He married in 1897, Alice Erskine, daughter of Major-General George Colclough, R.H.A., and they had a son, who followed to Balliol and took a first class in Philosophy, and four daughters.