Alfred Burdon Ellis
British Army officer and ethnographer (1852-1894)
Alfred Burdon Ellis (10 January 1852 – 5 March 1894) was a British Army officer and ethnographer, known for his writings on West Africa.
Life
The son of Lieutenant-general Samuel Burdon Ellis and his wife Louisa Drayson, daughter of the governor of Waltham Abbey factory, was born at Bowater House, Woolwich, on 10 January 1852. He was educated at the Royal Naval School, New Cross, entering the army as sub-lieutenant in the 34th Foot on 2 November 1872. He became lieutenant in the 1st West India Regiment on 12 November 1873. With them he was ordered to Ashanti, and arrived at the Gold Coast in December 1873, beginning a long connection with West Africa. He served through the Third Anglo-Ashanti War, receiving the medal.
Ellis was temporarily employed as civil commandant during the early part of 1874 at Seccondee on the Gold Coast; he was recalled to military duty in May 1874. In 1875, he paid a visit to Monrovia, and the following year he spent mostly in the West Indies. In March 1877 he visited the Gambia on his way to Sierra Leone, where his regiment was now ordered. He went on leave to England that summer, and on 27 October 1877 was seconded for service with the Gold Coast constabulary.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alfred Burdon Ellis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.