To His Excellency Colonel the Right Hon'ble Sir Francis Stanley Jackson, P. C., G. C. L. E. Governor of Bengal. May it please Your Excellency...

£3,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A lavish appeal to the British Raj, from one of India’s poorest districts. Printed on satin and ornately embellished, we have traced no other copies of this petition, which was clearly presented to the Governor. The recipient, Sir Francis Stanley Jackson (1870-1947) was the Governor of Bengal, having until two years previously held a seat as a Conservative MP in Yorkshire. This came after serving as a lieutenant in the 1st Royal Lancashire Militia during both the Boer and First World Wars, and a storied career as one of England’s best known cricketers. Jackson played twenty Test matches between 1893-1905, captained the England team, played alongside W.G. Grace, and mentored a young K.S. Ranjitsinhji. In his student days at Harrow, the younger Winston Churchill was assigned to “fag” for him. Jackson’s tenure as a colonial administrator in Bengal lasted between 1927-1932, “at a time when the province had become the nerve centre of Indian nationalists and protest politics. The outburst against the all-white Simon commission, which was appointed to review the workings of the 1919 constitutional arrangements in British India, Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement, revolutionary terrorism, and the rising tempo of peasant and labour militancy combined to pose a threat to the stability of the raj” (ODNB). Jackson took a hard line on these social movements by invoking emergency powers to crack down on individuals with revolutionary leanings. This manifested in an increase in policing,

• Binding: Hardcover

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