Sir Hugh Charles Clifford
Birth 5 march 1866
Died 18 December 1941
A descendant of Clifford of the Cabal under Charles II, and a grandson of the 7th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, Hugh Clifford was
expected to follow his father, a distinguished general, into the
British Army but decided instead to join the civil service of the
Protected Malay States, of which a relative, Sir Frederick Weld, was
then high commissioner. Arriving in Malaya in 1883, at the age of
17, not 10 years after the British takeover of the western peninsular states, Clifford became a cadet in Perak, and began a
close association of more than 20 years with the Malay people and
their lives. Like all district administrators of the time, he
learned the language and spent long periods living in remote parts
of the country. Those experiences, most particularly in the state of
Pahang, where he was sole British representative for two years from 1887,
gave Clifford a romantic taste for the exotic that became the
subject of his many essays, stories, and novels published from 1896,
when more senior posts--as resident of Pahang from 1896 to 1903,
with a brief interval as governor of North Borneo and Labuan--made
it impossible to mingle as he had with all levels of Malay society.
He was knighted in 1909.
Leaving Malaya in 1903 to become colonial secretary in Trinidad, and later governor successively of Ceylon, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria, he continued
for many years to write about Malaya and to republish his many
Malayan stories. No other place ever held for him the same
satisfaction. His official career closed with a final two years as
governor of the Straits Settlements and high commissioner of the
Malay States, from 1927 to 1929.
source:http://www.britanicca.com