A Keynesian solution
Achieving second place out of 104 candidates in the Civil Service examination of 1906, John Maynard Keynes took up the position of junior clerk in the Military Department of the India Office in October of that year.
The first task that faced him was to find bulls for the military’s dairy farms in Bombay. To breed high-quality milking cows, the army had decided to import British bulls and to cross them with Indian cows. Documents in the India Office Records, many in Keynes’s hand, describe the undertaking. With the help of John Speir, a cattle expert from Glasgow, ten young Ayrshire bulls were chosen and purchased. A pedigree was supplied with each bull (‘Mr Lindsay’s bull, Sire Prince Galla. Dam Beauty, in 1906 she yielded 807 gallons of milk of 4.3% fat’); costs and conditions of transport were negotiated with shipping agents, and a suitable escort was sought for the voyage. Speir’s nephew agreed to accompany the animals, and the SS ‘Costello’ set sail from Hull in January 1907. The cargo was delivered safely, sustaining no greater damage than a single calf with a sore foot.
Long after Keynes had left the India Office, the results of his work became clear. In 1912, Army HQ reported that ‘the half-bred progeny of Scottish bulls are greatly superior in every way to those of the Australian bulls’.
Keynes’s India Office career was brief. In 1908 he resigned to take up a fellowship at Cambridge. His strong interest in Indian monetary policy quickly made his reputation. After publishing Indian Currency and Finance in 1913, he was invited, aged only 29, to sit on the Royal Commission set up to investigate the Indian currency system (the Chamberlain Commission).
This document is Keynes’s draft of a letter to Speir. The annotations show the elaborate conduct of business for which the India Office was known. The draft was submitted upwards to the Secretary of State, John Morley, who passed it down to the Military Committee of the Council of India.* After Committee’s approval, the draft was reviewed and signed off by Council. A fair copy was despatched in the name of the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India, John Ellis. The original was returned to Keynes to file away.
Antonia Moon
Senior Archivist, India Office Records
Further reading:
D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: an economist’s biography (London: Routledge, 1992)
Find out more about the India Office Records.
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