The Colvin family, for the purposes of this article, is that group of people descended from James Colquhoun Colvin, the son of Alexander Colvin and Elizabeth 'Bettie' née Kennedy. James was a merchant trading between London and Calcutta during the East India Company. This Anglo-Indian family was intimately involved with the British Raj, first as traders and then as administrators and soldiers. Their descendants continued in service to the British Empire and later in some of its constituent countries.
Edward Thomas Colvin who married Mary Anne Browne daughter of Dr John Browne, Surgeon General in the Bengal Medical Service
Margaret Matilda Colvin who married Walker Pitcairn
Maria's eldest sister had married a Thomas Binny, who had traded at Madras and retired to St Andrews, Scotland. It was in their household that Bazett, John, and Binny Colvin passed their childhood.
Bazett David Colvin and his children
Bazett David Colvin was the eldest son of James. In 1840 Bazett married Mary Steuart née Bayley the daughter of William Butterworth Bayley a director and chairman of the British East India Company from 1834 to 1858. Among their children were:
Lt Col William Butterworth Colvin, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Fusiliers from 1881 until his death at Bellary in 1883.
Bazett David Colvin MA who migrated to Australia and married a widow Jessie Stanley Phipps née Tomlins
, the second son of James, rose to be lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces of British India during the mutiny of 1857, at the height of which he died. He married Emma Sophia, daughter of Wetenhall Sneyd, a vicar in England; they had ten children, many of whom continued the family connection with India.
Bazett Wetenhall, Elliott Graham, and Walter Mytton all passed distinguished careers in India, and a fourth, Clement Sneyd, C.S.I., was secretary of the public works department of the India Office in London. The third son, Auckland, was lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces and Oudh, and also served in Egypt. He co-founded the Colvin Taluqdars' College in Lucknow; he also published a biography of his father in 1895.
Further generations
Elliott Graham's daughter Brenda was an important landscape architect, author of standard works in the field and a force behind its professionalisation. One of Clement Sneyd's sons became Admiral Sir Ragnar Colvin, KBE, CB, and fathered John Horace Ragnar Colvin, the Cold War diplomat. Another son Sir C. Preston Colvin had much involvement in railway administration in Burma and India. John Colvin's son was the Australian journalist Mark Colvin, who wrote of his own and his father's careers in his 2016 book Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy's Son.
