Presume you have the probate for Sir James Crerar K.C.S.I. C.I.A. passed away Williamstown House, Castlebellingham County Louth - 29 August 1960
1960
Obituaries - The TIMES
The Times August 31 1960
SIR JAMES CRERAR
Sir James Crerar, K.C.S.I., C.I.E., who spent the first 20 years of his Indian Civil Service career in the Bombay Presidency and was later Secretary and then Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council in the Home Department, died on Monday. He was 82. He was born on December 11, 1877, the son of John Crerar, of Maryport, Cumberland, and educated at George Watson's College and Edinburgh University. He passed the Indian Civil Service examination of 1900 and spent his probationary year at Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained his M.A. On arrival in Bombay he was posted to Sind for early district experience and in 1906 became Assistant Collector and Manager, Encumbered Estates in that sub- province. Having quickly acquired the mastery of Sindhi he held for five years the post of translator to Government. At the end of 1911 Crerar was transferred to Rajkot as Assistant Political Agent in the Kathiawar State. In the middle of 1913 he was selected to be Municipal Commissioner of the Town and Island of Bombay and within a year was officiating as Secretary of the Judicial, Political and Special Department His courtly bearing and other qualities attracted the attention of the new Governor Lord Willingdon, and soon after the outbreak of war in 1914 he was selected to be the Governor's Private Secretary. Bombay was the real base of the many Indian contingents and it received the greater number of sick and wounded from Mesopotamia, British and Indian, and other Eastern theatres of the conflict. The services of the Willingdons in innumerable ways were of the utmost value to the Allied cause, and they had in Crerar an enthusiastic as well as a wise and patient right- hand man. At the end of 1922 Lord Reading had selected Crerar to officiate as Secretary of the Home Department at Delhi, and he was confirmed in the appointment in the following year. The post was onerous for at the time the Congress movement was nominated of Mr. Gandhi's cult of non-cooperation and civil disobedience. After a brief acting appointment, Crerar was chosen in 1927 to be Home Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council. Unlike his immediate predecessor, the late Sir Alexander Muddiman, who had gone to the United Provinces as Governor, Crerar was temperamentally grave and reserved, yet his handling of the Opposition in the Legislative and his sincerity in the promotion of the welfare of the sub- continent won him general confidence and esteem. For no less than 1Z anxious years, up to his retirement in 1934, he had been in the heavily overworked Home Department. He married, in 1916, Evelyn, third daughter of the Hon. Charles Brand. She died at the end of 1954. leaving a son and daughter.
December 24, 1954
Lady Crerar, wife of Sir James Crerar, K.C.S.I., C.I.E., died in London yesterday. She was Evelyn, daughter of the late Hon. Charles Brand, and her marriage took place in 1916.
Sandra
