Details

Name

Charles (Lord Lamington) Cochrane

Brief Biography

1860-1940, British

Occupation

Politician; Governor of Queensland (Australia) and Governor of Bombay (Mumbai) (India)

Description

Charles Cochrane Baillie was the son of Alexander Cochrane Baillie (1816-1890), the first Baron Lamington, named after the family’s estate in South Lanarkshire. Like his father, Charles Cochrane Baillie entered political life after completing his university education as a Conservative. He served as assistant private secretary to the Prime Minister, the Earl of Salisbury (1830-1903). He entered the House of Commons in 1886 as the Member of Parliament for London’s St Pancras North which he held until 1890.
It was in this year that his father died, and Charles Cochrane Baillie inherited the title of Lord Lamington in the House of Lords. That year he was sent to Vietnam and upper Myanmar on a mission to limit French expansion in the area and annex territory into the British Empire which briefly occurred until 1892.
In 1896 he became the Governor of Queensland (1895-1901). Following on from this post, from 1903 he was appointed the Governor of Bombay, today called Mumbai, in India and was in post until 1907. He was noted for being sympathetic to the Muslim and Baha’i faiths.
In Scotland, he was in the Royal Company of Archers, captain of the Lanarkshire Yeomanry, and in Britain, a Knight of the Cross of St Michael and St George representing his closeness to the royal family and representing the British Empire and military. In 1919 he was a Commissioner for British aid in Syria and also wounded in the assassination of Michael O’Dwyer in London in 1940 by Udham Singh. Although his arm was shattered in the attack Lamington was seen in public again after his recovery with his arm in a sling.
In 1895 he had married Mary Houghton Hozier, a daughter of the Scottish soldier William Hozier, 1ST Baron Newlands and their son, Alexander Brisbane William Cochrane Baillie (1896-1951) became the 3rd Baron Lamington. They also had a daughter Grisell Annabella Gem Cochrane Baillie (1898-1985) who married Edward George Godolphin Hastings of the Royal Navy in 1922.
Lord Lamington is remembered in Australia through Queensland’s Lamington Park, Lamington bridge, a volcano called Mount Lamington in Papua New Guinea, a nursing home in Brisbane and a cake called a Lamington. In Mumbai there is a still a Lamington Road, and in Hubli a Lamington High School founded in 1904.