Blayney Townley Balfour (1799 - 5 September 1882) was Lieutenant Governor of the Bahamas from 1833 to 1835. He was born in Ireland in 1799, and educated at Christ Church College, Oxford. His

father A father is the male parent of a child. Besides the paternal bonds of a father to his children, the father may have a parental, legal, and social relationship with the child that carries with it certain rights and obligations. An adoptive fathe ...

and

great-grandfather Grandparents, individually known as grandmother and grandfather, are the parents of a person's father or mother – paternal or maternal. Every sexually-reproducing living organism who is not a genetic chimera has a maximum of four genetic gra ...

(both also called ''Blayney Townley-Balfour'') were both Irish MPs. In June 1833 he assumed the governorship of the Bahamas after Sir James Carmichael-Smyth, the previous governor, was appointed to the governorship of

British Guiana British Guiana was a British colony, part of the mainland British West Indies, which resides on the northern coast of South America. Since 1966 it has been known as the independent nation of Guyana. The first European to encounter Guiana was S ...

. During this period he oversaw the implementation of the

Slavery Abolition Act 1833 The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire. It was passed by Earl Grey's reforming administrati ...

, which came into effect on 1 August 1834. In 1833 and 1834 he deployed troops multiple times to Exuma to "restore discipline" among Lord Rolle's slaves (later 'apprentices') there. However, the transition in August 1834 was otherwise "quiet and orderly", perhaps due in part to the fact that a system of indentured apprenticeships (understood by many including Balfour himself to benefit the holders more than the apprentices themselves) had been employed in the Bahamas since 1811, as well as to the threat of force In 1843 he married Elizabeth Catherine Reynell, with whom he had four children. He died on 5 September 1882.

References

1799 births 1882 deaths British governors of the Bahamas Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford 19th-century Irish politicians Irish justices of the peace {{Ireland-bio-stub