William Hopkinson

William Charles Hopkinson was an immigration officer and intelligence agent in British Columbia whose work was to watch Sikhs and other Indian immigrants. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) says he was born in India to an English father and an Indian mother and served in the Punjab and Calcutta police before coming to Canada. In 1909 he joined the immigration branch as an intelligence agent responsible for surveillance of Sikhs and other Indian immigrants.

His reports went to the deputy minister of the interior and were passed to the Colonial Office, the India Office and the viceroy of India, with copies to the director of criminal intelligence in Delhi. The DCB says any suggestion of Sikh support for Indian home rule or for anti-British mutiny was material for those reports. After the Ghadar Party formed in 1913, British and Indian officials paid close attention to his work. UC Berkeley's Echoes of Freedom guide says he turned his attention to the new organisation, set up networks of spies among the Gadar workers and called Lala Har Dayal the most dangerous of the revolutionaries; Har Dayal was arrested in March 1914 on his advice. In 1914 Hopkinson and his informants compiled lists of the men who sailed to India, marking for the Indian police those thought most dangerous.

Key moments

• 17 July 1914: Mewa Singh is arrested with ammunition and a revolver. The DCB says Hopkinson and the immigration branch wanted a statement implicating his companions and warned him that he could face ten years in prison.
• 5 September 1914: Bela Singh, one of Hopkinson's informants, fires into a funeral gathering at the Vancouver Sikh temple, wounding eight or nine men, two of them fatally.
• 21 October 1914: Mewa Singh shoots Hopkinson dead in a corridor of the Vancouver courthouse before a grand jury hearing in Bela Singh's case. The Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada's timeline says Hopkinson was due in court that day to testify in favour of Bela Singh. The DCB says Mewa Singh made no attempt to escape.
• 11 January 1915: Mewa Singh is hanged at New Westminster. The DCB says that at his trial, which lasted less than two hours, he read a statement that he was giving his life to show that his people "could not get justice in Canada".

Remembered for: He is remembered as the official at the centre of British surveillance of Sikh and Indian activity on the Pacific coast, and as the man Mewa Singh shot in 1914.