Walmsley, James Andrew (1912–2008), Indian civil servant and Dublin businessman, was born 4 October 1912 at The Green, in the townland of Aughnahoory, near Kilkeel, Co. Down, eldest of four boys of James Charles Walmsley, a farmer, and Margaret ('Peggy') Walmsley (née Fairbairn), originally from Co. Cavan and a nurse before her marriage. The Walmsley family had had a long involvement with various branches of the linen industry in the area. James attended primary school locally, then won a scholarship to attend Campbell College in Belfast from 1925. He was on the cricket first XI in 1931, and on the senior rugby team of 1930–31, when Campbell won the schools cup for the first time in five years. Walmsley won a junior exhibition to TCD in 1931, took the Brooke prize, and in 1934 was awarded a foundation scholarship. In his 1935 final examinations he obtained a first-class moderatorship in mathematics.
Walmsley taught for a year in his old school, but applied successfully for a post in the Indian Civil Service (he was one of 255 applicants, all holding first-class degrees, for fifteen places). He spent 1936–7 studying Indian law in University College, Oxford, before travelling to India. On 30 September 1937 in St Andrew's presbyterian church, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, he married Edith Mary ('Molly') Eason, whom he had met as a student when both were members of Trinity Players. She was one of four daughters of businessman John C. M. Eason (qv). Unusually, he was permitted to bring his new wife with him, and a month later they were in Patna, in Bihar.
The Walmsleys arrived in India at a time of great political turmoil; the movement for independence led by Mahatma Gandhi was gathering momentum, but at the same time there was increasingly bitter strife between Hindus and Muslims, as well as unrest among peasants seeking land reform. Walmsley was posted to the east Indian state of Bihar, and as joint magistrate from 1938 was responsible for administering British law in a huge area. By 1940, in the conditions resulting from the hostilities of the second world war, magistrates had been granted extraordinary powers of arrest and prosecution, to detain or expel nationalist and anti-war agitators. It was clear that British rule was coming to an end, and at the same time, especially in eastern India, atrocities carried out by Hindus and Muslims further destabilised the situation. Disturbances in east Bengal in 1942 led to Muslims attacking property, abducting Hindu women, and killing several hundred people; terrified inhabitants fled to Bihar. In retaliation, thousands of Bihar Muslims were massacred.
In 1943 Walmsley was transferred to Calcutta (Kolkata) to work in the department coordinating munitions production in India. At the time there were no direct threats to the safety of British officials, but, given the scale of internecine conflict, conditions were still very dangerous and volatile, and made worse by a disastrous famine in the region, in which millions died. The Walmsleys' servants refused to go out to try to buy food for the household, and Walmsley and his colleagues were obliged to go out in groups to remove corpses from the streets; low-caste workers who would ordinarily have done this work were too afraid. Molly Walmsley also helped the injured in casualty stations in the city. The Walmsleys' son and two daughters were all born in India in the 1940s; the conventional formulae of the announcements of their births in the Irish Times gave no clues to the chaotic and dangerous conditions in which the family was living.
Promoted in 1946 to deputy secretary to the government of India in the Department of Industries and Supplies, Walmsley volunteered to stay on in Delhi after India was granted independence in 1947 to try to help India weather the difficult transition. In September 1947 the formidable Taya Zinkin, the Zürich-born wife of one of his junior colleagues, cornered him in his hostel; she got into his bedroom while he was bathing, snatched his clothes and bath towel, and refused to leave until he agreed to help in running a huge refugee camp for which she and a solitary young Indian administrator, K. T. Satarawala, had just taken responsibility. The camp had been set up in a large city park, round Humayun's Tomb, to house 45,000 Muslims, who were under threat from the Hindu population and who wanted to leave India to go to the newly created state of Pakistan. Walmsley became camp commandment; Zinkin acknowledged that he was a first-class administrator, and the camp was said to be the best in the subcontinent.
A few months later, after the monsoon, the camp – then housing 95,000 people – was under several inches of water, and cholera broke out. Despite there being almost no police or military assistance, something like law and order was maintained. The three volunteers had to carry an enormous responsibility. On at least one occasion, according to Zinkin's autobiography, Walmsley dispersed a crowd of looters by cursing at them and hitting out at them with his shooting stick.
In 1948 he received an MBE for his services in India, and was offered a transfer to the British Foreign Office, but both he and his wife wanted to come home to Ireland. There Walmsley embarked on his second, much less stressful career, in business in Dublin, becoming a director in his wife's family's firm, Eason and Son, the very successful wholesale and retail stationers and booksellers. J. C. M. Eason had had four daughters, but no son, and for someone of his generation there was a very obvious vacancy in the company for a capable son-in-law. Walmsley was rapidly promoted to assistant managing director in 1950 when Eason retired, and in 1952 he was made joint managing director. In 1957 he became sole managing director, and also, when Eason finally completely retired in 1958 (after fifty-seven years in the firm), James Walmsley became chairman of the board.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Walmsley's skills of organisation and management brought continuing successful development to the firm, consolidating its position as the leading book and periodical supplier in Ireland. After 1957, for instance, he oversaw a change in Eason and Son's activities, strengthening the retail aspects of the business. The large premises on Dublin's O'Connell Street were extensively remodelled to create a modern shop on several floors; in a break with previous policy, high street shops were opened in other towns and cities. Walmsley's brother Basil Walmsley was in charge in the company in Belfast, and two shops opened there. By the late 1970s, retail sales were worth more than half of the turnover. Walmsley expanded the business by taking over a Cork-based rival, News Brothers, in 1958, but, as the railway era came to an end, the railway bookstalls, with which the firm had first enjoyed success, were phased out. During Walmsley's time as managing director, Eason and Son also moved out of the Dublin daily newspaper distribution aspect of the business; this ended in 1964.
Walmsley, despite his responsibilities and workload as head of one of the biggest companies in Ireland, played a significant role in a number of civic and charity organisations. In 1971, after years of membership, he was elected president of the Dublin chamber of commerce, and he was a vice-chairman of the Federation of Irish Employers and a council member of the Civic Institute of Ireland. He served for many years as governor on the board of the Rotunda hospital, and was honorary secretary to the board and chairman; he wrote a chapter on the history of the board of governors for Masters, midwives and ladies-in-waiting: the Rotunda hospital, 1745–1995 (1995), edited by Alan Browne. Walmsley maintained a lifelong interest in TCD; he was chairman of Trinity Trust and received an honorary MA from TCD in 1998.
He was perhaps best known in public life as a founder member of the Irish Times Trust, established in 1974 under the aegis of Major T. B. McDowell and the editor, Douglas Gageby (qv). He remained an active member for twenty-eight years, until 2002, always aware of the newspaper's responsibilities as a paper of record, despite difficulties of falling readership and new technologies.
James Walmsley's contributions to public life in Ireland were numerous; he was a respected employer of hundreds of staff, and displayed an ethos of commitment to civic responsibility perhaps more typical of earlier generations. His wife died in 2004, and afterwards James Walmsley moved into a retirement home. He died on 9 May 2008, aged 95; his ashes and those of his wife were buried in the Walmsley family grave in Kilkeel.