and West Indian Department of the Colonial Office. During this time he was again active in the Fabian Society. Feeling that the society had been stagnating since 1897, he hoped that a prominent new member, H. G. Wells, would be able to re-energise it. He supported Wells' campaign for a more radical Fabian agenda in 1906, but by the end of the year he had come to find Wells too erratic. In 1907, following a devastating earthquake in Jamaica, Olivier returned to the colony as governor. He was appointed a KCMG, making him Sir Sydney Olivier. He quickly reestablished order after the earthquake, and his reforms of the colony's government proved to be very popular. He was responsible for the construction of the Public Buildings in downtown Kingston in which the bureaucracy and courts were housed after the earthquake. He served in this post until 1913 then returned to England permanently, though he took very little part in Fabian activities upon his return. Moving outside of the Colonial Office, he served as Permanent Secretary to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries for four years, then as assistant comptroller and auditor of the Exchequer from 1917 until 1920, when he retired from the civil service to devote himself to philosophical and political study. However, this proved not to be the end of his public life. The Sydney Olivier Interscholastic Challenge Shield is the oldest and most prestigious schoolboy football title in Jamaica. The competition started in 1909 and the Shield is played between winners of DaCosta Cup for Rural Area Champions and Manning Cup for Urban Area Champions. Peer and Secretary of State for India In January 1924 Olivier was appointed Secretary of State for India in the first Labour government and sworn of the Privy Council The following month he was raised to the peerage by Ramsay MacDonald as Baron Olivier, of Ramsden in the County of Oxford. His appointment as India Secretary dismayed those who had expected the office to go to Josiah Wedgwood, a supporter of the Indian independence movement. Under Olivier there was no departure from the Conservative policy on India, although Mahatma Gandhi was released from prison after serving only two years out of a six-year sentence. Olivier's attitude to Empire had changed and he rejected calls for a new conference to discuss changes to the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms of 1921, reaffirming the traditional argument that Britain's