Thomas Henry Thornton

Thomas Henry Thornton CSI (1832 – 10 March 1913) was an English Indian Civil Servant, judge and author of two notable British Raj biographies.

Biography Thomas Henry Thornton was born in 1832, the son of a Times journalist, and educated at Merchant Taylors' School and read Classics and Modern history at St John's College, Oxford, at which he was afterwards a fellow.

In 1855, Thornton entered the Indian Civil Service in the last few years of the East India Company as one of the first officers selected by competition. He was posted to the Punjab and played a small but distinguished role in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, noted in Roberts Forty-one Years in India. Thornton had been returning from a visit to Philour fort, north of Ludhiana, as part of his work for George Ricketts, the Deputy Commissioner, when he came upon Indian soldiers of that fort and Jalandhar (Jullunder) marching in revolt on Ludhiana. Rather than return to the fort for protection, he rode on, cut the cables of a bridge of boats over the Sutlej River, and continued to Ludhiana to raise the alarm.

Works General Sir Richard Meade and the Feudatory States of Central and Southern India (1898) Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman: His Life and Work on Our Indian Frontier (1895) Historical Note, in Goulding, Henry Raynor & Thornton, Thomas Henry, Old Lahore: Reminiscences of a Resident (1924)