Valentine Blacker

Valentine Blacker CB (born in Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1778 - died in Calcutta, India, 4 February 1826), was a lieutenant colonel in the Honourable East India Company and later Surveyor General of India.

He obtained a commission in the Madras Cavalry in 1798, was made a cornet in 1799, and aide-de-camp to a Colonel Stevenson in the Wayanad district in 1800, and quartermaster-general in 1810. He served in Deccan, 1817, and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. He published a history of Maharashtra War, including discussion of the Battle of Khadki. He also authored a popular and widely anthologized poem on military service, Oliver's Advice,^[1] originally published under Blacker's occasional pseudonym, "Fitz Stewart".^[2]

Following the death of his predecessor, William Lambton, Blacker was made surveyor-general of India, stationed in Calcutta from 1823 until his death from a fever in 1826 (some accounts report 1827, but his gravestone reads 1826).^[3] Andrew Waugh said of him that "Blacker, with the exception of Col Everest, was the ablest and most scientific man that ever presided over this expensive department".^[4] He was buried in Calcutta.

He and his brother William Blacker both wrote pseudonymously, and the two are sometimes confused or conflated in texts.

Publications

• Memoirs of the operations of the British Army in India during the Mahratta war of 1817,1818 and 1819 (London 1821).

References

1. ^ Charles Gavan Duffy, The ballad poetry of Ireland, 4th ed. (1845), p. 83.
2. ^ John O'Hanlon, The Poetical Works of Lageniensis [pseud.] (1893), p. 140.
3. ^ Clements Robert Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (1878), p. 96.
4. ^ J. R. Smith, Everest: The Man and the Mountain (1999), p. 226.

• Macrae, Stuart (2004). "Blacker, (Latham Valentine) Stewart". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31907. Retrieved 15 December 2010. 

External links

• Lieut.-Col. William Blacker From The Dublin University Magazine, Volume 17, Number 101, May 1841

Persondata
Name	Blacker, Valentine
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1778
Place of birth
Date of death	4 February 1826
Place of death