India On 6 September 1816 he was appointed assistant surgeon on the
Honourable East India Company's Bombay establishment. He was moved to
Persia in 1819. He received his licence as a surgeon on 1 May 1824 and retired from the medical service on 4 June 1836, thereafter concentrating on the diplomatic aspects of the East India Company. He was attached to the field force under Colonel East in
Kutch and
Okamundel in 1818–19 and was afterwards deputy medical storekeeper at the presidency.
Persia From 1824 to 1835, he was attached to the East India Company's legation in
Persia, at first in medical charge, and latterly as political assistant to the Minister,
John Macdonald Kinneir, in which post he displayed great ability. For instance, in 1829 he was probably one of the instigators of the murder of
Alexander Griboyedov by Persian mob in
Teheran. On 30 June 1835, he was appointed secretary of the special embassy sent to
Tehran under
Henry Ellis to congratulate
Mohammad Shah Qajar on his accession to the Persian throne. McNeill received permission to wear the Persian
Order of the Lion and the Sun of the first class, and on his return home in the spring of 1836, he anonymously published a startling anti-Russian pamphlet,
Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East. From 1836 to 1844, McNeill was an envoy to Persia. See
Siege of Herat.
Scotland In 1845, McNeill was appointed chairman of the
Board of Supervision, entrusted with the working of the new
Poor Law (Scotland) Act 1845, a post he occupied for twenty-three years. In 1851, during the
Highland Potato Famine – nearly as disastrous as the
Great Famine of Ireland – he conducted a special inquiry into the condition of the western
Scottish Highlands and
Western Isles, during which he personally inspected twenty-seven of the most distressed parishes. During his stay in Scotland he lived at
Granton House in
Edinburgh. He was cofounder in 1851, with
Sir Charles Trevelyan, of the
Highland and Island Emigration Society which during the
Highland Clearances supported an exodus of nearly 5,000 people to Australia between 1851 and 1856.
Crimean War At the outbreak the
Crimean War in 1854, McNeill published revised editions in French and English of his pamphlet
Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East, with supplementary chapters dealing with the progress of events since 1836, and insisting on the importance to Britain and to
Christendom of the autonomy of
Turkey and Persia. At the beginning of 1855, when the Crimean disasters had roused public indignation, McNeill and Colonel
Alexander Tulloch, an officer of great administrative experience at the
War Office, were sent to the Crimea with instructions to report on the whole arrangements and management of the
commissariat and the method of keeping accounts, and to the causes of the delays in unloading and distributing clothing and other stores sent to
Balaklava. The commissioners started at once for the seat of war. They took no
shorthand writer with them, as the remuneration sanctioned by the
Treasury was insufficient to secure a qualified person. The McNeill–Tulloch inquiry was the most effective of the various inquisitions into the Crimean débâcle. It sharply criticised
Lord Raglan's personal staff in the Crimea and Commissary-General Filder, and it led to many recriminations as officers sought to clear their names when the report was published in 1856. A board of general officers was convened to clear the army, but despite its protestations, the McNeill–Tulloch report led to professional reform of the commissariat by the
Royal Warrant of October 1858. Very unusually, the
Commons, irritated by executive obfuscation, passed a resolution in 1857 calling for special honours and McNeill soon became a
Privy Councillor and Tulloch was appointed a
KCB. The
University of Oxford made McNeill a
Doctor of Civil Law and the University of Edinburgh chose him as chairman of its amalgamated societies; his inaugural address on competitive examinations was published in 1861. ==Personal life==