Name Richmond Ritchie | Died October 12, 1912 | |
Spouse Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (m. 1877) | ||
Sir Richmond Thackeray Willougby Ritchie KCB ISO (1854 – 12 October 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.
Richmond Ritchie was born in Calcutta, son of the jurist William Ritchie (1817–1862), who was practising law in Calcutta at the time. He was educated at Eton and 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 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. Knighted in 1907, on the retirement of Sir Arthur Godley in 1910 Ritchie became the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, a position he continued to hold until his death.