Henry Richard Wallis (1866-1946) was born in Darlington, County Durham, and emigrated to Durban in 1889 taking a job as an assayer to a mining company. He later served in the Natal Mounted Police before entering the Colonial Service in 1897, being appointed vice-consul in Fort Johnston (now Mangochi, Malawi). He rose through the colonial ranks as Deputy Governor of the Nyasaland Protectorate (1904), Acting Commissioner of Nyasaland (1905), Chief Secretary to the Uganda Protectorate (1911), Acting Governor of Uganda (1912) and eventually Governor of Uganda (1914). He married Jane Robina Wallace in Zomba in 1906; the couple had a son and a daughter. Wallis’s tenure coincided with the First World War; he was awarded the Crown of Belgium for his efforts in preventing German troops from passing through Uganda to the then Belgian Congo and also received the CBE in 1918. On retirement, the family moved to Edinburgh, before settling in Cheltenham where Henry Wallis died in 1946.