Name Charles Harris | Died March 26, 1947 | |
Education Christ's College, Cambridge | ||
Sir Charles Alexander Harris KCMG CB CVO (28 June 1855, Wrexham, Wales – 26 March 1947) was a British colonial administrator, Governor of Newfoundland from 1917 to 1922.
Harris spent much of his first ten years in St. John's, Newfoundland after his father, the Rev. George Poulett Harris, moved to the island when Charles was a young boy. Harris began his schooling in Newfoundland before returning to England where he attended Richmond School in Yorkshire.
Harris graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1878 and qualified for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. He began his career as a clerk in the Colonial Office in 1879.
From 1896 to 1899, he worked on a Boundary Arbitration between British Guiana and Venezuela, and from 1901 to 1904 on another between British Guiana and Brazil.
Harris became Chief Clerk of the Colonial Office in 1917. The same year, he was knighted and appointed governor of Newfoundland. Harris wrote essays on the history of Newfoundland and was a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography. He was offered the position of Governor-General of Australia but turned it down in favour of retiring from the colonial service in 1922 at the end of his term as Governor of Newfoundland.
In 1928 he edited for the Hakluyt Society Robert Harcourt's A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana by Robert Harcourt 1613.