Lord Curzon crossed Asia in a metal corset before governing India
A riding accident in his teens left George Curzon strapped into a metal brace for life. It did not slow him down. Between 1887 and 1895 he roamed Russia, Persia, the Far East and the Pamirs, becoming one of the most widely travelled men ever to sit in a British cabinet.
He was born in 1859 at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, on land his family had occupied since the 12th century, the eldest son among eleven children of a clergyman baron. His father was a stern man who thought landowners belonged at home and disapproved of his son's wanderings. At Oxford, Curzon threw himself into the Union and a Tory club, missed a first-class degree, then won the Arnold Prize for an essay on Thomas More, a subject he barely knew, and in 1883 a coveted fellowship at All Souls.
Parliament came in 1886, as member for Southport, and The Times called his maiden speech brilliant. The travels ran alongside: Russia and Central Asia in 1888 and 1889, Persia soon after, a sweep through Siam, China, Korea and Japan in 1892, and a bold trip into Afghanistan. His search for the source of the Oxus earned the Royal Geographical Society's Patron's Medal. The books he wrote warned that Russia, pushing a railway across Central Asia, was the chief danger to British India.
After a spell as a junior minister for India, he was sent out as Viceroy in 1899. He reformed the colonial administration, tried to curb mistreatment of Indians by the British, restored the Taj Mahal and sent an expedition into Tibet to check Russian influence. His term ended in 1905 amid the partition of Bengal and a bruising fight with Lord Kitchener over military control.
A second career followed. Curzon became Chancellor of Oxford University in 1907 and sat in the Lloyd George war cabinet. As Foreign Secretary from 1919 he gave his name to a proposed Soviet-Polish frontier and led Allied talks on the 1922 Treaty of Lausanne, which set Turkey's modern borders. Made a marquess in 1921, he was a contender for prime minister when Bonar Law retired in 1923, but the post went to someone else. His college friend Cecil Spring Rice had long predicted he would run foreign policy.
Source: George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
