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William Macbean George Colebrooke was educated at Woolwich, entering the Royal Artillery as a First Lieutenant on 12 September 1803, serving in India and Ceylon from 1805-1810. From 1811 he served in Java and was part of the conclusion of peace and return of Java to the Dutch in 1816. He served through the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–8, and accompanied the expedition to the Persian Gulf in 1818. He returned to England in 1821. From 1822 to 1832 Colebrooke was one of the commissioners of what was known as the Colebrooke–Cameron Commission (Eastern Inquiry) investigating the administration and revenues of Ceylon, where he resided from 1825 to 1831.

In 1834 he became Lieutenant-Governor of the Bahamas. His first speech to the Assembly was on 7 April 1835. He administered the colony during the days when slavery gave way to the apprenticeship system prior to its final abolition. In 1837 he was gazetted as Governor of the Leeward Islands, being at the time on leave in England. He assumed the government of Antigua and the other islands on 11 May 1837, and one of his earliest official acts was the proclamation of Queen Victoria. In this government, as in the Bahamas, he tried to improve education and reform prison discipline; he also urged the restoration of the old General Council of the Leewards.

On 25 July 1840 he left Antigua for Liverpool, and after an extended leave was on 26 March 1841 made Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick. In November 1846 he became a Colonel in the army. In 1847 he was gazetted to British Guiana, but never took up the appointment, going instead in 1848, as Governor, to Barbados, where he also administered the Windward Islands. Colebrooke worked for the suppression of crime and the improvement of the prisons. He also suggested a federation of all the Windward Islands, anticipating later proposals. In 1854 the withdrawal of imperial troops from the smaller islands caused some apprehension, but the peace of the islands was not really disturbed.

He became a Major-General in 1854. In January 1856 he relinquished his government and returned to England. He was promoted to Lieutenant-General in 1859 and General in 1865. He died at Salt Hill, near Slough, Buckinghamshire, on 6 February 1870.