Richmond Ritchie

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Sir Richmond Ritchie (1854-October 12, 1912) was an Indian-born British civil servant who spent most of his working life at the India Office, reaching the post of Permanent Under Secretary of State for India.

William Thackeray Willougby Ritchie (to give him his full name) was born in Calcutta, son of the jurist William Ritchie, who was practicing law in Calcutta at the time. Sir Richmond was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1877, probably due to family connections or pressures (his grandmother was a Thackeray and both the Ritchies and the Thackerays were old Anglo-Indian families), entered the India Office as a junior clerk. In the same year he married his cousin, Anne Isabella Thackeray, the eldest daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and later an author in her own right.

During his early years at the India Office he worked as Private Secretary to various Under-Secretaries of State, both Parliamentary and Permanent, the high point being when he was private secretary to the Secretary of State Lord George Hamilton from 1895 to 1902. From here he shifted to the post of Secretary in the Political and Secret Department until 1910 when, on the retirement of Sir Arthur Godley, Ritchie himself became the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, a position he continued to hold until his death. He had been knighted in 1907.