Life Story
To the modern sensibility, there is something slightly unnerving about Victorian certainty. Indian Civil Servants, such as Rowland Hill, would have been absolutely sure that they were doing both God's and Queen Victoria's work. Where we might wince at the idea of taking our Evangelical Anglican faith to the people of India, we can be sure that he and his wife would have done so with complete conviction, and three times on a Sunday.
Born into an army family, Rowland Hill spent much of his boyhood in India. The subcontinent was a place he knew. On his father's return to England, he was apprenticed at 15 to Eyre and Spottiswoode, the government printer. This turned out to be a piece of luck. Not only did it allow him to qualify as a printer-compositor, but it opened the path to becoming a colonial administrator of the Government printing presses in Bombay. It was almost certainly a relief to a family living on tight means.
There is a sense in which his own career is a metaphor for the growth of the Victorian British Empire. It needed men like him, and men like him saw their own prospects grow by association. He was the right man in the right place at the right time. Not a soldier, not a policy-maker, not a figure of any wider importance, his thirty years of service ran the Government presses in India, the daily work of producing the gazettes, regulations and official notices by which a continent was administered. While the lens through which the Raj is usually pictured is one of soldiers, administrators and the lives of the wealthy Maharajahs, what really held it together was paperwork, and Rowland was there to make sure the Government presses printed it. After three decades of such service he was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal — a recognition reserved for the steady, useful work which actually ran the Raj.
His family was one of intense faith, and the picture of the world he shared with his wife was one in which the British Empire was the greatest ever seen under God, Britain its rightful instrument, and the administrative work of holding it together self-evidently good. He died within a couple of years of returning home, perhaps marked, as so many were, by a life given over to a land that was never quite his own and a place in the Empire that took its toll of those who served there.