Arthur William Mahaffy

Arthur William Mahaffy O.B.E. was a colonial administrator who served in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate, the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, the Colony of Fiji, the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides, with his final post being the Administrator of Dominica.

Biography Mahaffy was the son of Lady Frances Letitia and Sir John Pentland Mahaffy. John Mahaffy was a Classics scholar and was a provost of Trinity College in Dublin. He was said to have taught the young Oscar Wilde. Following his graduation with a B.A., he accepted a junior position at Magdalene College, then he joined the Royal Munster Fusiliers as a 2nd Lieutenant. He was accepted into the Colonial Service in October 1895, joining the Western Pacific High Commission where his first position was as a District Officer in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate. Mahaffy was appointed as the Deputy Commissioner to Woodford in January 1898. In January 1900, Mahaffy established a government station at Gizo, as Woodford considered Mahaffy’s military training as making him suitable for the role of suppressing headhunting in New Georgia and neighbouring islands. Mahaffy had a force of twenty-five police officers armed with rifles, who were recruited from the islands of Malaita, Savo and Isabel.

Mahaffy was appointed as a resident magistrate. He visited Malaita on in 1902 to investigate several deaths. Mahaffy demanded the Malaitians give up the person believed to be the murderer, and when they did not, Sparrow shelled the village and a shore party burnt down the village and killed the pigs. Malaita was a difficult island to administer as Mahaffy believed that 80 per cent of Malaitan males possessed firearms in the 1900s. There were frequent inter-tribal killings and pay-back killings. Indiscriminate naval bombardments or naval shore parties destroying villages, canoes and killing pigs to punish Solomon Islanders was a common response to incidents, where the colonial administrators could not arrest the perpetrators of killings.

At this time, the Governor of Fiji simultaneously acted as High Commissioner for the Western Pacific. From 1892, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands were directly administered by a Resident Commissioner. In 1895, William Telfer Campbell was appointed as the Resident Commissioner, remaining in office until 1908. Telfer Campbell was criticised for his legislative, judicial and administrative management. It was alleged that he extracted forced labour from the islanders. In 1909, Mahaffy returned to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorates for three months as Assistant High Commissioner, to carry out an inquiry into this allegation. and he issued his findings, which were published in 1910.

In 1913, an anonymous correspondent to The New Age journal, probably John Quayle-Dickson, published an article under the title "Modern buccaneers in the West Pacific", and described the maladministration of Telfer Campbell, and challenged Mahaffy’s impartiality, because he was a former colonial official in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate.

He was appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1919 Birthday Honours.

His family donated his Solomon Islands ethnographic collection and papers to the National Museum of Ireland.