Bailey, Frederick Marshman

• Frederick Marshman Bailey

• Frederick Marshman Bailey, CIE FRGS

• Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Marsham Bailey, CIE FRGS

• Lt.-Col. Frederick Marsham Bailey

a British political officer and one of the last major figures of the Great Game. His expeditions in Tibet and Assam Himalaya gave him many opportunities to pursue his hobbies of photography, butterfly collecting and trophy hunting in the high Tibetan region.

In 1913 he made an unauthorised exploration to the Tsangpo Gorges with Captain Henry Morshead of the Survey of India. Morshead was later a surveyor for the initial 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition, along with George Mallory. Their adventures led them to the Rong Chu Valley, a gorge on the Upper Tsangpo. It was in that valley that Bailey spotted a tall blue poppy at the margin of the forest and pressed it in his notebook, now called Meconopsis baileyi.

One of Bailey's more well-known adventures occurred in 1918, when he travelled to Tashkent in Central Asia on a mission to discover the intentions of the new Bolshevik government, specifically in relation to India.

He helped Frank Kingdon-Ward and Lord Cawdor in 1924 when he was a Political Officer in Gangtok, Sikkim. Bailey arranged passports and encouraged them to search the 40 mi unexplored gap of the river to solve the riddles of the Tsangpo Gorges. Kingdon-Ward wrote a book by the same name documenting that expedition.

Fluent in Tibetan

Tibet
China

• Engels

• Latijn

Obituary: Lieutenant‐Colonel Frederick Marsham Baily, C.I.E. (1967). Journal of The Royal Central Asian Society, 54(2), 223–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/03068376708731997

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Marshman_Bailey

Image: FM Bailey, CIE (1953) By unknown, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32802638