The last British missionary in India, Father Ian Weatherall, has died in New Delhi, aged 91.
Fr Weatherall, who grew up in British India and served as an officer in the
Punjab Infantry regiment in the Second World War, was described as one of
the last links between the British Raj and the new independent India.
He knew India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the members of his
first cabinet, and witnessed many of the key events in the creation of
modern India.
Britain's military advisor in India, Brigadier Brian McCall, and Sir Mark
Tully, the veteran author and broadcaster, led tributes to him and described
him as a "citizen of two cultures" who dedicated his life to India but
remained passionately British to the end.
Fr Weatherall spent his early years in Calcutta, where his father was a
British Army officer, and Scotland before returning to serve as a jungle
warfare specialist on the North East Frontier, training troops to fight the
Japanese in Burma. At the end of the war, he spent a few nights at a
monastic seminary in Delhi on his way home to demobilisation in Britain, and
was so moved he decided he would become a priest.
He studied theology in Britain and returned to India in the late 1940s to
Delhi to serve as an Anglican priest. He became a prominent member of the
Cambridge Brotherhood order in Delhi and the founder of its social work with
leprosy victims and the poor and elderly in East Delhi. He served as a
director of Delhi's St Stephen's Hospital, and vice-chairman of St Stephen's
College, the most prestigious of the Delhi University colleges.
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