Sir John Henry Lefroy (1817–1890), governor, army officer and meteorologist, entered the Royal Military Academy at age 14 and became a second lieutenant with the Royal Artillery in late 1834. After three years, during which period he was promoted to lieutenant, he began studying astronomy; subsequently, he was among the officers who proposed the establishment of the Royal Artillery Institution, and became its founding secretary in 1838. In September 1839, he embarked as a member of a naval expedition engaged in a magnetic survey of British islands, making his way to remote St Helena in the South Atlantic via Madeira, the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, Trinidad and Martin Vas. During his two year stay at St Helena, he assisted in the disinterment of Napoleon’s remains for removal to France for burial. In 1842 he left for Canada, having been appointed superintendent of the observatory at Toronto. From the late autumn of 1843 until November the following year he was engaged in an expedition tasked with a geomagnetic survey of British territories in North America and an attempt to locate the magnetic north pole. The expedition traversed over 5000 miles and involved Lefroy and his assistant taking observations at some 300 stations, with the findings being published by the Royal Society in 1855. Lefroy’s journals from the period are filled with scientific and geographical observations along with notes on the customs, traditions and ‘general condition of the Indians’. His subsequent work at the Toronto observatory, from 1844 to 1853, is said to have been the most comprehensive undertaken within Britain’s network of colonial observatories; and by the time he returned home he had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society, and had founded Toronto’s Canadian Institute, of which he was later president. In 1854 he compiled the Handbook of Field Artillery for the Use of Officers, which remained a standard text for artillery officers until 1884. Lefroy served as a special adviser to the War Office during the Crimean War (Florence Nightingale corresponded with him on military hospitals and related matters, and became a lifelong friend), and later was closely involved in reforms to the system of military education as inspector-general of army schools. He retired from the army in 1870 having attained the honorary rank of major-general. While governor of Bermuda from 1871 to 1877 he compiled a two-volume history of the colony while also continuing his scientific work. He was appointed KCMG in 1877. In 1880 he became governor of Tasmania, arriving in Hobart with his second wife, Charlotte, in October that year. As he had done in Bermuda, Lefroy took a keen interest in the colony’s cultural, economic, agricultural and social progress as well as in its scientific life, serving as president of the Royal Society of Tasmania during his brief tenure. A most popular governor, Lefroy was commended on his departure in November 1881 for ‘the interest Your Excellency has always taken in the advancement of the colony, as evidenced by your willing exertions to further all objects calculated to ensure the same’. In later years, Lefroy produced papers and lectures on a variety of subjects; published his Diary of a magnetic survey of a portion of the dominion of Canada (1883); and served on the committee of the Universities Mission to Central Africa. He died in Cornwall in April 1890. The small town of Lefroy, north of Launceston, is named for him, as is Mount Lefroy in the western Canadian Rockies.
