William Keir Grant

General Sir William Keir Grant, GCH, KCB (1771 – 7 May 1852) was a British Army officer.

Born William Grant, he was the son of Archibald Keir, HEICS. On 30 May 1792, he was gazetted a cornet in the 15th King's Light Dragoons, under the name of William Keir. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1793, and accompanied part of his regiment to Flanders, where he fought at Famars, Valenciennes, and elsewhere in the –. He distinguished himself on 17 April 1794, when a squadron of his regiment saved Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg from the enemy's hussars during a reconnaissance; and he was also present at Villers-en-Cauchies on 24 April 1794 when two squadrons of the 15th and two of the Austrian Leopold hussars, although unexpectedly without supports, defeated a much larger force of French cavalry, pursued them through the French infantry, and captured three guns — an action which saved Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, who was on his way to Koblenz, from capture by the French.

Keir was promoted to a troop in the Carabiniers (6th Dragoon Guards), with which he served in Germany in 1795 and Ireland in 1798. In the latter year, Keir received permission from George III to wear the large gold medal given by the emperor in commemoration of the action at Villers-en-Cauchies. Only nine of these medals were struck, one being given to each of the eight British officers present, and the ninth placed in the Imperial Museum in Vienna. These officers were also made Knights of the Military Order of Maria Theresa, which, as with other foreign orders of chivalry before 1814, carried the rank of a Knight Bachelor in England and other countries. It also gave the wearer the rank of baron in Austria.

Keir joined the Russian and Austrian armies in Italy early in 1799, and served in the –. He was present at the battles of Novi, Rivoli, Mondovi, and Sanliano; he served in the gunboats at the Siege of Genoa, in which he was frequently engaged, and in several actions in the mountains of Genoa, when the Austrians and Russians lost nearly 33,000 men; and he was also at the Battle of Marengo and the sieges of Alessandria, Sanaval, Tortona, Cunio, and Savona.

On 3 December 1800, Keir was appointed a lieutenant colonel in the 22nd Light Dragoons, with whom he landed in Egypt after the end of hostilities in 1801. The regiment was disbanded on the Treaty of Amiens, and Keir was placed on half pay. For a short time he was aide-de-camp to George, Prince of Wales, and after acting as first aide-de-camp to Lord Moira, who was commanding in north Britain from December 1804 to May 1806, he was appointed adjutant-general of the King's troops in Bengal. He commanded the advance of Major-General St Leger's force on the Sutlej in 1810. In 1811, he married a daughter of Captain Jackson RN. And in 1814, while on the Bengal staff, Keir, who had become a colonel in 1810 and a major general in 1813, was appointed to command a small force of cavalry and grenadiers sent against Amir Khan.

In 1815, Keir was made commander-in-chief and second member of council in the island of Java, a position he held until the island was restored to the Dutch after the peace. In 1817, he was appointed to the Bombay staff and commanded the Gujarat field force, part of the army of the Deccan Plateau, in the operations against the Pindaris. In February 1819, he was in command of a force assembled on the frontier of Sawantvadi. The latter proving intractable, the troops entered the country, carried the strong hill fort of Rairi by storm, and marched to the capital, where a treaty meeting the full approval of the Governor-General of India was signed with the regency. In March the same year, he commanded a force sent against the Raja of Kutch, which, after defeating the enemy and capturing the hill fortress of Bhuj, received the submission of that province.

In October 1819, Grant-Keir, as he was then called, was dispatched by the Bombay government with a strong armament for the suppression of piracy in the Persian Gulf. The attack was specially directed against the Qasimi, a tribe of seafaring Arabs of the sect of Wahhabis, whose pirate craft had long been the terror of the coasts of western India. Ras al-Khaimah, their stronghold, had been destroyed by a small force from Bombay in 1809, but their power was again in the ascendant. Ras al-Khaimah was captured with small loss on 9 December 1819, and on 8 January 1820, Grant-Keir signed a general treaty of peace on behalf of the British government with the chiefs of the tribes of seafaring Arabs of the Persian Gulf, by whom it was subsequently signed at different times and places. It provided for the entire suppression of piracy in the gulf. For his services, Grant-Keir received the thanks of the Governor-General in Council, and the Persian Order of the Lion and the Sun. He returned home on the expiration of his staff service, and later assumed the surname Keir Grant. He was made a KCB in 1822, lieutenant general in 1825, GCH in 1835, colonel of the 2nd (Royal North British) Regiment of Dragoons in 1839, and general on 23 November 1841.

Keir Grant died at his residence, 20 Chapel Street, Belgrave Square, London, on 7 May 1852, aged eighty.

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