The Indian Civil Service list (1904) 'Gradation list of covenanted civil servants on the Bombay establishment' lists him as "Humphreys, Robt., NW Provs, Oudh, Punjab and cen. provs". He served in Hoshiarpur, in the Punjab, and is buried there.

We still have a rather wonderful folded cloth, a bit like a tea-towel: on one side is a map of Hoshiarpur district, showing rivers and lakes in blue. On the other is an all-purpose series of tables listing equivalent weights and measures, but more particularly the various individuals and their ranks with the pensions or payments they were entitled to receive. I suspect it was designed to be folded into an officer's saddle- bag."
 
The Kaiser-i-hind ('Emperor of lndia') medal was instituted in May 1900, so Robert was part of one of the very first group of recipients, a considerable distinction. It "may be given to any person, irrespective of race, occupation, position, or sex, who shall have distinguished himself, or herself, by important or useful service in the advancement of the public interest in India."

"Robert may well have known Daisy, his future wife, from the very first. They came from the same area of Cork and both families had Methodist connections - minority of the non-Catholic minority -  though [

] Paddy and Joan had never heard of that when I asked them.

Cousin Robert says the medal was awarded for grandfather's work on drought relief, building canals, but I don't know whether it's possible to find out more about this sort of detail. Robert is listed under 'casualties' in the 1917 List, with the date 7/11/1916. He died of an illness. I am sure I saw somewhere the alarming statement that he "caught a chill", and died of it."

The Indian Civil Service list says that Robert had a BA from the Royal University of lreland, Cork, and Trinity College Cambridge, and that he passed the competitive examination into the Indian Civil Servive in 1893, beginning his first tour of duty in India in 1894. This suggests that he decided to aim for the Indian Civil Service after getting his degree. He would have had to study for the entrance examination before doing so, which I believe would have been quite demanding. We still have a book of exam papers from that sort of time. A student was to study two legal systems (British, Roman, Moslem - etc.?) and three languages. This was the ultimate multiple- choice exam paper because there was a full set of questions for each of 36 or so languages. Example:

construe the following passage into Persian

[what is now called Farsi, the language of Iran and the Parsees in India]

using the aorist tense ....

Rhoda Allport (*1883), Robert Humphreys' niece, and the grandmother of Linden Ellis