Colonel Heber Drury (4 March 1819 - 30 October 1905) was a British army officer who worked in India and contributed to botany in his spare time. He published two books and several articles on botany and is commemorated in the name of the only peninsular Indian species of slipper orchid in the genus ''Paphiopedilum'', '' P. druryi'', which he collected in the hills of

Agastyamalai Agastyaarkoodam is one of the peaks in the Western Ghats of Tirunelveli District of Tamil Nadu, India. This peak is a part of the Agasthyamala Biosphere Reserve which lies on the border between the Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Tirunelveli ...

Drury was the fourth son of Rev. Henry Joseph Thomas Drury, of Harrow, and Ann Caroline Tayler. He was born on 4 March 1819 (some sources give 22 May 1819 which may be the date of Christening). His brother B.H. Drury was later a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. Educated at Harrow, he became a cadet and joined as an ensign in the Madras Native Infantry in August 1837. He was a Lieutenant in the 45th Native Infantry in Travancore on 19 June 1838 and was commissioned Captain on 23 January 1846 and joined the Escort of the

British Resident A resident minister, or resident for short, is a government official required to take up permanent residence in another country. A representative of his government, he officially has diplomatic functions which are often seen as a form of indi ...

at Travancore in 1846 and from 1852 to 1862 served as assistant to the Resident, General

William Cullen William Cullen FRS FRSE FRCPE FPSG (; 15 April 17105 February 1790) was a Scottish physician, chemist and agriculturalist, and professor at the Edinburgh Medical School. Cullen was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment: He was ...

. In 1857 he was appointed to take charge and educate some princes in the Presidency of Madras. With the outbreak of the

Sepoy mutiny The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the for ...

, he was placed in the

Madras Staff Corps The Indian Staff Corps was a branch of the Indian Army during the British Raj. Separate Staff Corps were formed in 1861 for the Bengal, Madras and Bombay Armies, which were later combined into the Indian Army. They were meant to provide officers ...

where he commanded the Nair Brigade in Travancore consisting of two infantry regiments, sixty troopers and guns. In 1863 he became Lt. Colonel and in 1867 he was promoted to Colonel and retired in the same year. In his spare time Drury studied plants and wrote ''The Useful Plants of India ; with Notices of their Uses in Medicine, Commerce, and the Arts'' and the ''Handbook of the Indian Flora'' in three volumes (dedicated to the Travancore King Rama Varma). He also published some historical letters on the Dutch in Malabar and on hunting in ''Reminiscences of Life and Sport in Southern India'' apart from papers in the ''Madras Journal of Literature and Science''. Drury married Annie Playfair Ross (died 1859) (daughter of John Ross, Madras) in Trivandrum 29 April 1852 and had five children including a namesake son born in 1854. He married Elizabeth Sarah Court in 1861 at St Mary's Berkshire and had seven children. He died in 1905 at Holton, Mayfield.

References

External links

* Genealog
Source 1Source 2

Reminiscences of Life and Sport in Southern India (1890)

The Useful Plants Of India (1873)
* Hand-book of the Indian Flora (1869
Volume IVolume IIVolume III

Letters from Malabar - translated from Dutch by Heber Drury (1863)
British botanists People educated at Harrow School 1819 births 1905 deaths Naturalists of British India {{DEFAULTSORT:Drury, Heber