Triple First: Maurice Zinkin

Writing about Abba Eban the other day, I mentioned his academic distinction—a Cambridge triple first. Can anyone match it? The answer is “yes.” Apparently there are two other Cambridge triple firsts. One is Neal Ascherson, the Scottish journalist. The other is Maurice Zinken.

Ah—Maurice who? Exactly. He doesn’t even rate a Wiki entry. But count on the obituary editor of the Telegraph to take his measure. Here’s the account from May 28, 2002:

Maurice Zinkin, who has died aged 87, excelled as an administrator in British India, where he endured malaria, a broken back and the shock of having his stand-in shot dead during the Partition riots; he later made his mark as an industrialist and author.

Zinkin entered the Indian Civil Service in 1938 with one of the highest marks ever recorded in the ICS exam; before that, he had graduated from Cambridge with a Triple Starred First.

He began as a Supernumerary Assistant Collector, touring the remote tribal lands of the Bhils on horseback, collecting revenue and enforcing law and order over an area a third of the size of Wales.

Life in the ICS was formal: even when on the move and sleeping in tents, Zinkin would bathe each evening in a tin tub filled with water heated by kerosene, then put on a dinner jacket. "Helps to keep up morale," he explained in a letter to his future wife. "It is so easy to let oneself go if one does not keep up appearances."

Each morning, after a cup of tea in bed, he was dressed by his bearer - until his wife Taya (nee Ettinger, later India correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, Le Monde and the Economist) put a stop to it after the war.

During the war, while in charge of his own subdivision, Zinkin suffered 19 bouts of malaria in two years, an ordeal he carefully omitted from his letters home. The quinine caused shaking and depression, and while riding along he took to dreaming in Marathi, the local language, waking up every time he did not know a word.

Later, in Bombay, he fell from a horse and broke two vertebrae, entailing six months in a plaster cast which began below the shoulders and ended above the knees. As head of air raid precautions for the city, he nonetheless insisted on doing his work in hospital, flat on his back, holding his files above his head. In the humidity, the itching was almost unbearable; maggots under the cast contributed to the torture.

Around this time, he was responsible for the admission of the first woman into the Secretariat, when he recruited as one of his assistants Miss Salukhere, an orphaned Brahmin graduate who later married an ambassador.

Maurice Zinkin was born on May 4 1915 in Leeds and grew up in London. His father, who owned a furniture factory in Hackney, died when he was nine. His grandfather on his mother's side was Rabbi Daiches, Chief Rabbi in Leeds. From Haberdashers' Aske, he won a scholarship to Jesus, Cambridge, to read History and Law. After graduating, he stayed on for three years as a tutor before sitting the ICS entrance exam.

Eban got his own Telegraph obit six months later on November 18 when he, too, died at the age of 87.