Herbert Archibald Douglas
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Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Archibald Douglas was a British Army officer.
He was born at Salwarpe on 2 April 1874, the son of Thomas and Janet Douglas. He was educated at Eton and was commissioned in the Wiltshire Regiment on 29 May 1895.
On 14 September he was posted to India, returning home on 7 October 1898 and sent to India again in May the following year. He transferred to the Army Service Corps in January 1902 and thence to the Indian Supply and Transport Corps in 1909. His postings were: 1904 Mhow; 1905 Ambala; 1908 Chitral and Drosh (during which he served in the Mohmand Expedition); 1912 Lyallpur, when he was Commandant of the Grantee Camel Corp. He served with Indian troops in France 1914-1915 and was appointed Assistant Director of Supplies in the latter year. After service in Mesopotomia in 1916 he returned to India. He was promoted Lieutenant-Colonel on 29 May 1921 and retired 1 June 1922.
On 4 December 1915 he married Marie Louise Dollez at the Embassy Chapel in Paris and in his retirement settled in France. He was a prominent member of the English community in Paris, helping and advising in the British consulate. He also organised the annual dinner for old Etonians in Paris. The last ten or twelve years of his life were overshadowed by illness, possibly arising from the long-term effects of a severe accident at polo in 1917. He died on 19 October 1941.
Among the memorabilia he left, now in the Janus library collection [1] there is a volume called "Report on a Mission to Sikkim and the Tibetan Frontier, with a Memorandum on our relations with Tibet"[2]. This has led to supposition that he was the mysterious Professor J.Archibald Douglas responsible for debunking Nicolas Notovitch's "The Life of the Holy Issa"[3]. At the time, he was a skilled amateur photographer stationed at Ambala on the Northern Indian frontier, not far from Agra where the alleged Professor was tenured.
