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Robert Grant (British Army officer)

British army officer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 9, 2026
Entity authorityQ18954538 ↗
Source-derived summary

Sir Robert Grant (10 August 1837 – 8 January 1904) was a British lieutenant-general and royal engineer.

Biography

Grant was born at Malabar Hill, Bombay, on 10 August 1837, was younger son of Sir Robert Grant, governor of Bombay, and was nephew of Lord Glenelg. His mother was Margaret (d. 1885), only daughter of Sir David Davidson of Cantray, Nairnshire, N.B., who married as her second husband Lord Josceline William Percy, M.P., second son of George fifth duke of Northumberland.

Robert was educated at Harrow with his elder brother Charles [see below]. When he was seventeen he passed first in a public competitive examination for vacancies in the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers caused by the Crimean War, and was gazetted second lieutenant in the royal engineers on 23 October 1854, becoming first lieutenant on 13 December of the same year. After six months' training at Chatham Grant was sent to Scotland. In February 1857 he was transferred to the Jamaica command in the West Indies, and at the end of 1858 he served on the staff as fort adjutant at Belise in British Honduras. He passed first in the examination for the Staff College, just established; but after a few months there (Jan.–May 1859) he was aide-de-camp to Lieut.-general Sir William Fenwick Williams, the commander of the forces in North America for six years. On 8 August 1860 he was promoted second captain.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Robert Grant (British Army officer)” is british army officer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Robert, Grant and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1837, 1904, 1885, 1854—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Robert, Grant and British is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

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The phrase “british army officer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18954538. The first chronological checks are 1837, 1904, 1885 and 1854.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Robert Grant (British Army officer)” 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.