Early Life
David Petrie was born on 9 September 1879 at Inveravon, Banffshire, the second surviving son of Thomas Petrie, master millwright, and his wife, Jane Allan. After taking an MA degree at Aberdeen University, Petrie entered the Indian police in December 1900. He served for three years in the Punjab and was then seconded (1904–8) to the North-West Frontier Province as quartermaster and adjutant of the Samana Rifles (Kohat border military police). After acting as assistant to the deputy inspector-general of the Punjab criminal investigation department (1909–11), he was moved to the Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI), responsible to the Home Department of the government of India, and there became assistant to its assistant director.
In December 1912 bomb attack on the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, in Delhi led to an investigation by Petrie and his investigation took until he February 1914 when he managed to arrest the terrorists. He received the King's Police Medal. The outbreak of the First World War resulted in an upsurge in the activities of militant Indian nationalists, partly because so many British troops were being transferred to the Western Front. In a gun battle with Sikh revolutionaries at Budge-Budge on 29 September 1914 Petrie was wounded, and a subsequent infection meant convalescence back in Britain.
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