Engineer, architect and writer. Born into a distinguished military family, he joined the Bombay Artillery in 1858, qualifying five years later as a surveyor and engineer. In 1867 he was appointed Chief Engineer of the state of Jaipur, a post he retained until his retirement to England in 1911 aged 71. No sooner had he returned than he was recalled to India to assist Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker in the design of New Delhi, but failing health soon forced him to withdraw. Jacob was made a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire in 1902. He designed numerous public buildings in an Indo-Saracenic style. Although the majority are in India, two buildings on which he was involved are in East Sussex. The first is the Jaipur Gate, which stands in the grounds of the Hove Museum of Creativity and was designed by Jacob in collaboration with Surgeon-Major Thomas Holbein Hendley. Commissioned by the Maharajah of Jaipur, it takes the form of a Naqqar Khana, or drum platform, built of Bombay teak and covered with a painted metal dome. The wooden surfaces were carved in Shekhawati, Rajasthan, by local craftsmen and the structure was shipped to England for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington, in 1886. The Institute presented the Jaipur Gate to Hove Town Corporation in 1926 at the time of the opening of Hove Museum. The second is The Chattri, a memorial to the Indian soldiers who served in the First World War. Constructed of white Sicilian marble and standing on Patcham Downs, just outside Brighton, it was unveiled by Edward, Prince of Wales, on 1 February 1921, and was designed by the Indian architect, E.C. Henriques, under Jacob’s supervision.
Bibliography: Historic England official list entries: (i) The Chattri, (ii) The Jaipur Gate; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 90–91; The Times, 7 December 1917, p. 7 (obituary); Who Was Who (online edn), 2007; Wikipedia: ‘Samuel Swinton Jacob’.
Jill Seddon, Peter Seddon and Anthony McIntosh, 2014; revised, Terry Cavanagh, April 2025