Henry Thuillier

Sir Henry Edward Landor Thuillier (10 July 1813 – 6 May 1906) was Surveyor General of India. Under his direction, 796,928 square miles of India were surveyed, including difficult mountainous, forest, and desert regions, often for the first time. He was responsible for the printing in 1854 of the first postage stamps valid throughout India. Thuillier was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1869, made a CSI in May 1870, and knighted in June 1879. Early life Thuillier was born at Bath on 10 July 1813, was youngest of eleven children (five sons and six daughters) of John Pierre Thuillier, Baron of Malapert, and merchant of Cadiz and Bath, by his wife Julia, daughter of James Burrow of Exeter. An elder sister, Julia, married Walter Savage Landor in 1811. He was descended from Huguenots who, on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, first settled in Geneva. He was educated at the East India Company's military academy, Addiscombe. Marriage Thuillier married firstly in 1836 Susanne Elizabeth (died 1844), daughter of the reverend Haydon Cardew of Curry Mallet, Somerset, by whom he had a son (Colonel Sir Henry Ravenshaw Thuillier, KCIE, also Indian surveyor-general, 1887–95), and a daughter; and secondly in 1847 Annie Charlotte, daughter of George Gordon Macpherson, Bengal medical service, by whom he had six sons (three of them became officers in the Indian army) and two daughters. Career Thuillier was gazetted to the Bengal artillery on 14 December 1832 and was stationed at the headquarters, Dum Dum. Transferred to the survey department in December 1836, he first served with parties in Ganjam and Orissa, and later was in charge of the revenue surveys in the Bengal districts of Cachar, SyLhet, Cuttack, and Patna. In January 1847, ten months before receiving his captaincy, he was appointed deputy surveyor-general and superintendent of revenue surveys. That post he held for seventeen years, in the course of which he much improved the survey system and rendered the results more readily accessible to the public. He "followed in the track of the different trigonometrical series, and thus had the advantage of fixed stations on which to base his detailed surveys". He was joint author with Captain R. Smythe of The Manual of Surveying in India (Calcutta, 1851; 3rd edit. 1885). There he discussed the difficult question of Indian orthography, which was officially standardised while he had charge of the department.