The birthday of Sir Stamford Raffles
This short note by C. E. Wurtzburg, published in JMBRAS Vol. 20 (1947), argues that Sir Stamford Raffles’s true birthday was 6 July, not the commonly cited 5 July, and offers a plausible explanation for the discrepancy.
Summary
Wurtzburg observes that the date 5 July for Raffles’s birth first appeared in Lady Raffles’s Memoir, yet she also records his death as occurring on 5 July, “the day before he completed the age of 45 years”—an internal inconsistency that later writers such as Boulger failed to notice. Egerton and Coupland, by contrast, gave 6 July without comment. Wurtzburg supports the 6th on the basis of a copy of Major Travers’s diary, which shows Raffles himself celebrated his birthday on that date. He then proposes an explanation for the confusion: Raffles was born at sea, and at the time a day at sea was reckoned from noon to noon rather than midnight to midnight. If Raffles was born before noon on 6 July by shore reckoning, the event would have been entered in the ship’s Official Log under the date 5 July (p. 187).