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Abstract
E. P. Richards’ Calcutta report of 1914 has been reprinted as a key text in planning history, but little is known of the man himself, compared with other planners active in the British colonies during the early twentieth century such as Geddes and Reade. This article seeks to rescue Richards from obscurity, and position him in the context of the new town planning movement in the first quarter of the twentieth century. A basic narrative of Richards’ career, taken mainly from his membership records and obituary at the Institute of Civil Engineers’ headquarters in London, covers his key periods with the Derwent Valley Water Board (working on the Birchinlee model village) and the Calcutta and Singapore Improvement Trusts between 1901 and 1924.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was disclosed by the author.
Notes on contributor
Robert Home is professor of land management at Anglia Ruskin University. He has published widely on planning and planning history, especially in developing countries. His books include Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (1997) and Demystifying the Mystery of Capital: Land Titling and Peri-urban Development in Africa and the Caribbean (2004). He has currently in press chapters for the Routledge Planning History Handbook, the Oxford History of the British Empire: Architecture and Urbanism, and Historical Perspectives on Squatting.
Notes
1. Introduction by Harris and Lewis to Richards, Town Planning of the City of Calcutta, xi.
2. Moorhouse, Calcutta, 262.
3. Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire; Ward, “International Diffusion of Planning.”
4. Sorensen, “Path Dependency.”
5. Withey, “Glasgow City Improvement Trust,” 10.
6. In Home, Of Planting and Planning, fn.13 on page 91, I wrote that ‘I have discovered little about Captain E.P.Richards’, which can now be corrected.
7. Obituary in Proceedings of ICE, 23 (1962): 540–1.
8. Application papers to the ICE 1878. He worked in Manchester, Wolverhampton, and Burslem before Warwick.
9. According to his ICE application papers, he was ‘one of the senior engineers and personal civil engineering assistant’ to the Chief Engineer Edward Sandeman. The University of Nottingham library holds records of the Derwent Valley Water Board in its Manuscripts and Special Collections, while heritage links between the Peak District National Park and India are explored on the website https://heritagehindusamaj.wordpress.com.
10. Morris, “Navvy Huts and Settlements.”
11. Robinson, Memories of Tin Town; Bevan, Tin Town; and Bevan, Upper Derwent. The Howden reservoir was used to train the Dambusters in 1943, and the Board was abolished in 1974, its responsibilities transferred to the Severn Trent Water Authority.
12. In 1912, the Tata steel works rolled the first steel ingot in India on 16 February, the Howden dam opened on 5 September, and Viceroy Hardinge was nearly assassinated on 23 December.
13. Catanach, “Plague and Tensions of Empire”; Echenberg, Plague Ports; Sutphen, “Not What, but Where”; and Furedy, “Lord Curzon and the Reform of the Calcutta Corporation.” Dr Simpson subsequently became a public health consultant to the Colonial Office on town planning segregation matters; see Home, Of Planting and Planning, 47–8.
14. Richards, Calcutta, 14.
15. Cecil Henry Bompas (1868–1956) joined the Indian Civil Service in 1887 and retired in 1922. ‘He inherited special legal qualities, and a taste for administration in local self-government’ (Obituary, The Times, 10 February 1956: 11); the CIT Annual Report 1955–1956 called him its ‘de facto creator’. Today, he is cited on the internet for Bompas, Folklore of the Santal Parganas, a compendium of 200 folklore tales from the largest aboriginal tribe in India, the Santhals.
16. Chaudhuri, Calcutta, 43 records Richards’ surprise that the city exported £23 million a year, yet ‘this splendid trade’ was not funding civic improvements. See Datta, “How Modern Planning Came to Calcutta.”
17. Army Lists 1914–1918. Thanks to Charles Reid (Research Volunteer, Gordon Highlanders Museum) for his help with Richards’ military service.
18. Baker and Bayliss, “Simpson.”
19. Fraser, “Singapore Improvement Trust.” Richards collaborated with his fellow planner Charles Compton Reade in the adjacent Federated Malay States (Goh Ban Lee, “Import of Urban Planning into Malaysia”).
20. ‘Report of Trust for the Year 1924’ in Straits Times, 11 August 1925, 11.
21. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 161–8.
22. The Malay Civil Service was created in 1921 following the Indian example, and recruiting only ‘natural-born British subjects of pure European descent on both sides’.
23. Fraser, Work of the Singapore Improvement Trust.
24. Bissell, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power.
25. CIT Annual Reports 1933–1934 and 1934–1935. Both these list A. J. Thompson ARIBA as a member of the CIT appointed by local government; this is presumably the garden city architect-planner Albert Thompson, made redundant from his post in Nigeria in 1932.
26. Chew and Lee, History of Singapore, 43–5; Perry, Kong, and Yeoh, Singapore, 3238.
27. Richards, “Geology of Newbury district.” His memberships included the Institute of Civil Engineers, Royal Sanitary Institute, Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, Institute of Water Engineering, the Geological Society, the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, and the Town Planning Institute.
28. Cecil Bompas died not far away five years earlier, in Hampshire in 1956.