Victor Purcell

Victor William Williams Saunders Purcell CMG, PhD, Litt.D (Cantab.) (26 January 1896 – 2 January 1965) was a British colonial public servant, historian, poet and Sinologist in Malaya (now Malaysia).

After World War I, Purcell pursued his undergraduate study in Cambridge University, studying history at Trinity College.

During his service in Malaya he dealt in particular with the role of the local minority Chinese and published significant works on this subject.

In 1926 he spent seven months as District Officer on Christmas Island, Indian Ocean, with wide-ranging but largely undemanding responsibilities in that remote mining community (Magistrate, Assistant District Judge, Port Officer, Port Health Officer, Postal Agent, Assistant Protector of the Chinese plus others).

From 1949 he lectured in Far Eastern History at Cambridge University.

In 1978 he was honoured by a postage stamp of Christmas Island.

Bibliography

• Victor Purcell: Early Penang, Penang 1928
• Victor Purcell: The Further Side of No Man’s Land, London 1929
• Victor Purcell: An Index to the Chinese Written Language on a New Non-radical System with Reference to the Dictionaries of Kanghsi and Giles, Singapore 1929
• Victor Purcell: The Spirit of Chinese Poetry, and original essay, Singapore 1929
• Victor Purcell: Problems of Chinese Education, London 1936
• Victor Purcell: The Dog and the Don, Singapore 1938
• Victor Purcell: Chinese Evergreen, the story of a journey across south China, London 1938
• Victor Purcell: Cadmus: The Poet and the World, Melbourne 1944
• Victor Purcell: Malaya: Outline of a Colony, London 1946
• Victor Purcell: The Chinese in Malaya, London 1948; (Chinese translation), Singapore 1950
• Victor Purcell: The Position of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, New York 1950
• Victor Purcell: The Chinese in Southeast Asia, London 1951; 2nd impression 1952; new edition 1964; (Chinese translation), Taipei 1966
• Victor Purcell: The Colonial Period in Southeast Asia, a historical sketch (mimeograph), New York 1953
• Victor Purcell: Malaya: Communist or Free, London 1954
• Victor Purcell: The Chinese in Modern Malaya, Singapore 1956
• Victor Purcell: The Sweeniad, signed Myra Buttle, New York: Sagamore Press, 1957, London 1958. (The identification of this peseudonym was published by Edmund Wilson in 1966 in The Bit Between my Teeth.)
• Victor Purcell: Toynbee in Elysium, a fantasy in one act, signed Myra Buttle, London 1959
• Victor Purcell: The Bitches’s Brew or the Plot against Bertrand Russell, signed Myra Buttle, London 1960
• Victor Purcell: The Revolution of Southeast Asia, London 1962
• Victor Purcell: The Boxer Uprising, a background study, Cambridge 1963
• Victor Purcell: Malaysia, London 1965
• Victor Purcell: Memoirs of a Malayan Official, London 1965
• Victor Purcell: South and East Asia since 1800, Cambridge 1965
• Hai Ding Chiang: Sino-British mercantile relations in Singapore's entrepot trade, 1870-1915. In: J. Chen und N. Tarling (Hrsg.): Studies in the social history of China and Southeast Asia: essays in memory of Victor Purcell. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 1970. S. 247-266.