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Hugh Clifford

Portrait of Hugh   Clifford

Sir Hugh Charles Clifford (5 March 1866, Roehamption, London – 18 Dec 1941, Roehamption) was a British colonial administrator and a writer who devoted a novel, The Downfall of the Gods, to Angkor and the ancient Khmer civilization. 

The son of a distinguished British Army general, he opted to join the civil service in the Straits Settlements (Singapore), and within the administration of the British Protectorate of the Federated Malay States. He spent twenty years in Pahang (ancient Malay kingdom, now a State of Malaysia, east coast of the Malay Peninsula), studying traditional cultures and languages. In 1903, he left Malaya to take the post of Colonial Secretary of Trinidad and Tobago, and was later appointed Governor of British Ceylon (1907−1912), Governor of the Gold Coast, 1912 – 1919, Nigeria, 1919 – 1925, and Ceylon, 1925 – 1927. In 1937, he returned to Malaya as Governor of the Straits Settlements and British High Commissioner, but due to the ailing health of his second wife, Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle Bonham, he retired from civil service in 1929.

Several schools in Malaysia are named Clifford School in his honour.

Publications

  1. In Court and Kampung. Singapore, Graham Brash, 1899. ISBN 9971−4−9199−0. [First published as: East coast etchings. Singapore, Straits Times Press, 1896.]
  2. A Dictionary of the Malay Language [with Frank Swettenham, published in stages between 1894 and 1902, abandoned after letter G].
  3. various essays and short stories located in Malaya including Studies in Brown Humanity, Bushwacking, A Free-Lance of To-day, In Days that Are Dead, Malayan Monochromes, The Gold Coast Regiment in the East African Campaign, Heroes of Exile (Being Certain Rescued Fragments of Submerged Romance), 1900s.
  4. Further India, being the story of exploration from the earliest times in Burma, Malaya, Siam and Indo-China, New York, Frederick A. Stokes, 1904.
  5. The Downfall of the Gods. London, John Murray, 1911.
  6. A prince of Malaya. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1926. [repub. as Saleh : a prince of Malaya. Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1989.]
  7. Stories by Sir Hugh Clifford. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1966. [repub. as At the court of Pelesu and other Malayan stories. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1993.]
  8. In a corner of Asia; being tales and impressions of men and things in the Malay Peninsula. Freeport, New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1970.
  9. Journal of a mission to Pahang : January 15 to April 11, 1887. Honolulu, University of Hawaii, Southeast Asian Studies Program, 1978.
  10. “An expedition to Kelantan and Trengganu: 1895” JMBRAS, 1992 [repub. of ​“Report of an expedition into Trengganu and Kelantan in 1895”. Kuala Lumpur, JMBRAS (Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society), v. 34 pt. 1, 1961.