SIR WILLIAM CROFT

Sir William Croft, K.C.B., K.B.E.. C.I.E., C.V.O., wvho died on Tuesday, two days after his seventy-second birthdav, gained distinction as a member of the staff of the India Office and in the 1939-45 War did valuable work at Delhi and later at Cairo on the economic side. Subsequently he spent nearly eight years in the City of London as chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise.

William Dawson Croft, son of William Bleaden Croft, was born on August 16. 1892, and educated at Winchester and Trnity College, Oxford, where he took II Class in Moderations and I Class in Lit. Hum. He entered the administrative side of the India Office in 1919 and was soon serving as private secretary to the permanent under-secretary, Sir William Duke. He was joint secretary of the First Session of the Indian Round Table Conference in London in the winter of 1930-31. There followed, for a period of six years, his private secretaryship to three successive secretaries of state of such diverse personalities as Wedgwood Bena (later Lord Stansgate), Sir Samuel Hoare (later Lord Templewood)X and Lord Zetland.

At no time during nearly 90 years' existence as a department in Whitehall had the India Officc a more strenuous and exacting period than that covered by Croft's association with these political heads of the Office. The period covered the two further sessions of the Round Table Conference, the protracted sittings of the Joint Committee of Parliament, and the drafting of the Indian Bill which met prolonged parliamentary opposition from Sir Winston Churchill and his followers. Sir Samuel Hoare wrote of his ordeal as a witness before the Joint Select Committee on the Government White Paper on Indian Reform that with Sir Findlater Stewart and Lord Hailey at his side and "Croft, my invaluable private secretary, behind me, I exposed myself like some up-to-date St. Sebastian to a rain of arrows on every side "

The transfer of Croft in 1937 to the Economic and Overseas Department in Whitehall was a helpful prelude to his work in the matter of Indian supplies for the war effort. Lord Linlithgow. the Viceroy, early formed the conception of setting up an Eastern Supply Council at New Delhi. and in this connexion secured the loan of Croft's services. The Council did invaluable work for the members of the Commonwealth comprising it until the Japanese onslaughts broke the chain and other arrangements had to be made. In the last two years of the war Croft was chief civil assistant to the Minister of State in Cairo.

For a short time before removal to Delhi, Croft had been deputy under-secretary of state. He returned to that position early in 1946, and was on the staff of the cabi,net mission to India in that year, but in the summer of 1947 was appointed chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise. After his retirement from this post in the spring of 1955 he...