Victor Purcell

Victor William Williams Saunders Purcell CMG (26 January 1896 – 2 January 1965) was a British colonial public servant, historian, poet, and Sinologist in Malaya (now Malaysia).

He was educated at Bancroft's School and joined the British Army as an officer in 1914. He fought in France in the First World War and was severely wounded in combat on two occasions. He was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1918 and spent the remainder of the war in a P.O.W. camp.

After the war, Purcell entered Trinity College, Cambridge under the veteran admissions scheme to study history. At Cambridge, he was editor of Granta and secretary of The Cambridge Union.

He joined the Malayan Civil Service in 1921 and chose to specialize in Chinese affairs. After some years of language study in China, he embarked on a twenty-five year career in the Chinese secretariat of the MCS.

In 1926 he spent seven months as District Officer on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, with wide-ranging but largely undemanding responsibilities in that remote mining community (Magistrate, Assistant District Judge, Port Officer, Port Health Officer, Postal Agent, Assistant Protector of the Chinese, and other responsibilities).

He became particularly interested in the topic of Chinese education and in 1939 returned to Cambridge where he wrote a dissertation on the topic, drawing on his experiences among the Chinese community in Malaya, that was accepted for a Ph.D.

He returned to Southeast Asia during the Second World War and was involved in information and publicity. He finished the war with the rank of colonel, having served with Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma in the South East Asia Command at Ceylon.

From 1949 he lectured in Far Eastern History at Cambridge University and gained the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy and Litt.D (Cantab.) During this period he published a mock epic poem The Sweeniad under the pseudonym Myra Buttle (Secker & Warburg 1958), which parodied the style of T. S. Eliot and which was subject to a long, mostly favorable article by the eminent American man of letters Edmund Wilson.

In 1978 he was honoured by a postage stamp of Christmas Island. In 1970 he had a collection of essays in his memory.