Papers of Walter Melville Wace

"An English- Malayalam Vocabulary compiled by Melville Wace". 121 loose pages, typed, of an English to Malayalam vocabulary with extensive handwritten annotations. Also a front page with biographical details and bearing a Royal Asiatic Society stamp. The annotations and the biography have been added to the manuscript at a later date by an unidentified author who also seems to have undertaken repair of some of the pages.

Walter Melville Wace was educated at Worcester College, Oxford, before serving in the Bedfordshire Regiment in the First World War. He then became a manager of a rubber plantation in Johor, then part of British Malaya. During this time he compiled this English- Malayalam Vocabulary. He spent the last fourteen years of his life in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and died in 1942. He is the author of Yolande of Johor (1929) and Wild Light (1932).

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It is unknown when these Papers became part of the Society's Collections. The covering biographical note with the Vocabulary, might suggest that they were given after his death in 1942.

These papers were catalogued by Nancy Charley, RAS Archivist, in 2019.

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The custodial history is unknown.