SIR CHARLES HOWELL

THOMAS

TITHE REDEMIPTION

COMMISSION

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir, Charles John Howell Thomas, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., T.D., chairman of the Tithe Redemption Commission from 1936 and formerly Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, died in a nursing home at Windsor on November 26.

He was .born in 1874 son of the late Mr. John Hlowell Thomas, and before the 1914-18 war was surveyor to the Metropolitan Water Board and a member of the. Treasury Committee on Post Office Buildings. When the last war broke out -he im.mediately offered his services and was commissioned in the Royal Field Ar tillery rising to the rank of lieutenantcolonel. He saw much and varied active service in France, Egypt, and India.

After the. Armistice he was appointed to be British member of the International Valuation Board Reparation Commission in Paris which was set up under the Treaty of Versailles to ascertain the amount of Germany's liability under Part VIII of the treaty. This work occupied him during 1920 and 1921, and the next year he served as British member of the International Committee on Ceded Property under the Treaties of Trianon, Neuilly, and St. Germain. His next appointment, which he held frorm 1922 to 1925, was that of British member of the Compensation (Ireland) Commission. Thomas was a member of the United Kingdom Delegation to the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa in 1932 and was a delegate to the World Monetary and Economic Conference held in London in 1934.

In 1927 he had been appointed Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, and the next year became the representative of the United Kingdom on the executive council of the Imperial Agricultural Bureaux, serving as such until 1937. In 1936 he was chairman and principal United Kingdom delegate at the British Commonwealth Scientific Conference in London. Later in the year it was announced that he had been selected to be chairman of the Tithe Redemption Commission established under the then recently passed Tithe Act. Thomas also did good work as chairman of the Samaritan Free Hospital for Women, as deputy president of the Red Cross Agrictilture Fund, as chairman of the Board of Studies in Estate Mana'gement at London University, and from 1939 to 1941 as chairman of the stores committee of the British Red Cross and St. John War Organization.