Lt Col Oscar Ferris Watkins CMG CBE DSO (1877–1943) was a British colonial administrator, Commandant of the East African Carrier Corps[1] in the First World War.
[2] He was the son of Rev Oscar Dan Watkins (1848–1926), Archdeacon of Lucknow,[3] and Elizabeth Martha née Ferris (1846–1928) and was born in Allahabad.
[4] Educated at Marlborough [5] and a 'bible clerk', that is undergraduate scholar at All Souls College, Oxford, by virtue of being a founders' kin,[6] in 1899 Watkins cut short his study to enlist in the ranks of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in the Second Boer War; after the war joining the South African Police.
During the First World War Watkins set up the Carrier Corps,[8][9]and strove to organise an effective force while at the same time protecting the hundreds of thousands of African porters conscripted into the force from the excessive demands of the British high command.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, he used his knowledge of Swahili to broadcast and edit Baraza, a sister paper to the East African Standard, started with a subsidy from the Colonial Government to bolster the British war effort in East Africa.