Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere, 1st Baronet, GCB, GCSI, PC (29 March 1815 – 29 May 1884) was a British colonial administrator.

[2] After leaving the East India Company College Frere was appointed a writer in the Bombay Presidency civil service in 1834.

Having passed his language examination, he was appointed assistant collector at Poona in 1835, and in 1842 he was chosen as private secretary to Sir George Arthur, Governor of Bombay.

[citation needed] These services were fully recognized, as he received the thanks of both houses of Parliament and was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB).

Commissioner & Chief of Education Department, with an equal number of Hindu and Muslim members, which unanimously decided on the use of Persio-Arabic Sindhi script with slight modifications.

[7] In 1875, he accompanied the Prince of Wales to Egypt and India, with such success that Lord Beaconsfield asked him to choose between being made a baronet or a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath.

Frere accepted the position, on a salary double that of his predecessor, and with the understanding that successful implementation of confederation would result in his being appointed the first British Governor-General of a federated southern African dominion.

However an earlier plan by Sir George Grey for a federation of all the various colonies in South Africa had been rejected by the home authorities in 1858, as not being viable.

South Africans resented the perceived high-handed manner in which it was being imposed from London with little accommodation and knowledge of, or concern for, local conditions and politics.

Cape Prime Minister, John Charles Molteno, advised that under current conditions confederation was ill-suited to and badly timed for Southern Africa.

Its formal response to Carnarvon's confederation model, conveyed to London via Frere's predecessor Sir Henry Barkly, had originally been that any federation with the illiberal Boer republics would endanger the rights and franchise of the Cape's Black citizens, and was therefore unacceptable.

The Cape government viewed the dispute as a local police matter, but Frere immediately traveled to the frontier and declared war on the neighbouring independent state of Gcalekaland.

Frere also expressed concerns that the continued existence of independent African states posed in his words an ever-present threat of a "general and simultaneous rising of Kaffirdom against white civilization".

[15] The Transkei Xhosa were defeated and annexed early in 1878, by Lord Chelmsford and a small force of regular and colonial troops.

This unprecedented move solved his constitutional hindrances in the Cape, but was overshadowed by a growing set of conflicts across Southern Africa and Lord Carnarvon's resignation in early 1878.

While Carnarvon remained as Colonial Secretary in London the view had support but his replacement, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach strongly wished to avoid any war in southern Africa.

Frere nonetheless used the delay in mail between London and Cape Town, to time his letters so as to circumvent the Colonial Office's opposition to war.

On 11 January 1879, British troops crossed the Tugela River; fourteen days later the disaster of Isandlwana was reported, and that was enough for the House of Commons to demand that Frere be recalled.

The delay in giving the country a constitution afforded a pretext for agitation to the resentful Boers, a rapidly increasing minority, while the defeat at Isandlwana had badly tarnished the reputation of the British Empire in the region.

Owing to the Xhosa and Zulu wars, Sir Bartle had been unable to give his undivided attention to the state of things in the Transvaal until April 1879, when he was at last able to visit a camp of about 4,000 disaffected Boers near Pretoria.

[20] On his return to Cape Town, he found that his achievement had been eclipsed—first by 1 June 1879 death of Napoleon Eugene, Prince Imperial in Zululand, and then by the news that the government of the Transvaal and Natal, together with the high commissionership in the eastern part of South Africa, had been transferred from him to Sir Garnet Wolseley.

[9] Upon his return, Frere replied to the charges relating to his conduct with regard to Afghanistan as well as South Africa, previously referred to in Gladstone's Midlothian speeches, and was preparing a fuller vindication when he died at Wimbledon on 29 May 1884.

Dalzell stated "Sir H. B. E. Frere, not only as a mark of esteem and respect, but also because he always has been the enlightened encourager and promoter of scientific researches in India, and is himself a close observer of nature.