Charles Pawsey

Sir Charles Ridley Pawsey, CSI, CIE, MC (1894–1972) was a British colonial administrator.

Pawsey was commissioned into the Worcestershire Regiment in 1914 and won the Military Cross as a Lieutenant in 1916. He was promoted Captain in 1917 and resigned his Territorial Army commission in 1922.

Sir Charles was appointed Assistant Commissioner in Assam in 1919, becoming Director of Land Records in 1932. He was made a Deputy Commissioner in 1935 and was District Commissioner (D.C.), Naga Hills during the Burma campaigns of 1942 to 1944. Prior to his return to England following India's independence, he wrote in the Naga Nation, underlining that autonomy within the Indian Union was the more prudent course to follow. For, "Independence will mean: tribal warfare, no hospitals, no schools, no salt, no trade with the plains and general unhappiness".

Deputy Commissioner Charles Pawsey's bungalow and tennis court were the place where the British Fourteenth Army finally turned the tide of the war against the Japanese during the Burma Campaign of World War II at the Battle of the Tennis Court.