CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Reality of Failure
INDIA
— 1895 —
We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.
‘Having confidence in myself’, as he put it, had become central to McLoughlin after he lost his arm. Like most men, his self-esteem was calibrated, in part, by his standing among his peer group. But the execution of Stevenson had destroyed the conduit linking his self-perception to the opinions of his cohort, giving rise to an insoluble problem. In order to live with himself, he had had to execute a police informer who had placed his own liberty above that of the gang’s members, but, by doing so and then fleeing, he had cut himself off from those on whose approval he relied. In a world filled with paradoxes, he had done an honourable thing, but having left, he was condemned to a social death.
With the exception of Tommy – already back in Australia – he was alone in the world. As a fugitive from justice he was an itinerant, a man of no fixed abode, a man forced to conceal his true identity and to deny his past. He was someone who had mortgaged his future to hubris and needed to stay on the move. Having chosen the disorientation that came with exile, he was forced to forfeit the social compass that all men need – the one that links time and places past to the present and the foreseeable future.
But by abandoning the Witwatersrand he had also done something far more serious, something potentially fatal. He had turned his back on Johannesburg, a place barely out of its swaddling clothes. It was a rough-and-ready frontier town, one in which ordinary men’s notions of right and wrong – especially in cases of murder – spoke to authority about justice and power in male, populist, tones. The mere efflux of time meant that, at some time in the future, any charge of murder would resonate differently in a city where a more settled social order was built around family life. The unwritten code of masculinity that had informed his actions at the Red Lion that night stood a better chance of speaking to ‘natural justice’ if they were rooted in the appropriate context of time and place. Any explanation as to why it had been necessary to execute Stevenson was more likely to be understood if it were presented beneath a battered corrugated-iron roof of a mining town than if it were to be heard by a middle-class jury in the hallowed halls of justice. For justice to prevail the accused had to be arraigned and tried in his own epoch, by peers who understood the ethos and hidden ideological contours of everyday life. Justice delayed, as the adage has it, is justice denied. By choosing to disappear into the margins of the Indian Ocean world, he was cocking a snook at the logic of history. It was risky. In the short term it might drag out his social death, but, in the longer run, it might ensure a short and nasty demise at the hands of the state executioner.
At one level, he understood that, as a person wanted for the murder of two men, he no longer had a claim to a public persona or a truthful past, let alone one built around crime in several countries. Yet, for all that, it was difficult coming to terms with the new realities. The choice of India as a place of refuge was born of a compromise. On the one hand, he had to avoid the colonies of settlement of the southern oceans – Australia, New Zealand and the Straits – places where the Imperial Eye, in the shape of its governors-general, police, press and the telegraph – swept across horizons with increasing regularity to take in and control a sprawling British world.
On the other, he wished to exploit his talent for safe-blasting in a setting that would sustain him when the Krugersdorp funds were exhausted. He also wanted the opportunity to accumulate the even greater sums he would need once the Eye had tired and his choice of destinations widened. For that to happen he needed access to English-speakers, men with military backgrounds, who had nothing to lose; men who could be moulded into a unit. More importantly, he needed access to gold mines. From the little he had heard when the Albatross had called in at Bombay in 1881, and the many positive things that Jack McCann had told him about regimental life on the subcontinent, south-central India had much to offer.
It is uncertain when exactly – let alone whether – he disembarked at Bombay, on the western Malabar Coast, or whether he left the vessel at Madras, on the Coromandel coast, in the east. From the little that is known, it would seem that it was in late April, perhaps early May of 1895 that he stepped ashore, probably in Bombay, a port that he was not only familiar with from his earlier visit, but one that was still a natural point of exit from the age-old trans-oceanic monsoon trade routes that linked India to the south-eastern coast of Africa. Gold had once found its way to India from the hand-dug pits of central-southern Africa via Sofala. It added to the irony that it was now a robber from the south who was intent on relieving India of some of the gold from its own ancient workings that had been rejuvenated by recent ‘discoveries’. He was a modern thief but some of the gold he hankered after was drawn from sites that were thousands of years old. In the eighteenth century, pirates had roamed the Indian Ocean in search of gold wherever they found it, but by the late nineteenth century it was some of the newly dispossessed from the industrial world who crisscrossed the globe by steamship to secure the precious metal at ‘new’ points of production.
The Princely State of Mysore, as created by the British in 1799, was a good destination for an amalgam-thief and murderer on the run.1 Located in the present-day province of Karnataka, in the south of the country, Mysore lay beyond easy diplomatic reach of the South African Republic and, even if the Kruger government somehow did manage to obtain the support of the British, a request for extradition from a quasi-independent Indian state would necessitate considerable political effort. Carved out of the older and once even more extensive Muslim Kingdom of Mysore, the princely state was, after 1881, ruled indirectly by a British surrogate, the Maharaja, and after 1894 by a regent drawn from the prestigious Hindu Wodeyar family.2
Situated for the most part along the Deccan Plateau, with its more congenial climate, the princely state’s once thriving indigenous textile industries had declined in importance during the late nineteenth century just as surely as Liverpool and Manchester’s had grown to dominate the production of cheap cotton fabric for developing international markets. In the south-west the city of Mysore and, to the north-east of it, Bangalore – the administrative centre – remained significant sites of local economic focus. But in the 1870s a new source of revenue for the state’s coffers had emerged at the eastern extremity of the plateau, in the slowly reviving Kolar goldfields. The timing of the ‘discovery’ was hardly fortuitous; it was part of a global search for new sources of the metal as the gold standard emerged as the primary mechanism for underwriting world trade.
In 1871, Michael Lavalle, an Irish soldier who had turned himself into a civil engineer after being bewitched by the yellow metal in New Zealand, was granted the exclusive right to prospect for gold around Kolar. Pre-colonial diggings abandoned because of flooding had, over the past 70 years, been worked intermittently with the help of steam pumps that were becoming increasingly efficient. The first attempt to mine Kolar gold on a fully industrial scale had, however, collapsed in the early 1880s for want of working capital and lack of insight into the nature of the ore-holding body. The discovery of the new ‘Champion Lode’, in 1885, changed everything.
Within months of finding the new lode the original mining concession was acquired by John Taylor & Son in the City. Under their financial management, several deep-level shafts were sunk, including those belonging to the Balaghat, Champion Reef, Mysore, Nundydroog and Oorgaum Companies. These new ventures, spread over 70 square miles, paid royalties to the princely state and formed part of a state-within-a-state for legal purposes. They proved to be an unparalleled success. Between 1884 and 1907, the output of the mines rose to realise gold worth close on £10 million, allowing over £5 million to be paid in dividends. By 1894, the underground workforce consisted of over 7 000 workers; at its height in 1907 the Kolar goldfields employed close on 30 000 workers. McLoughlin’s timing was perfect. When he arrived there, in 1895, the industry was enjoying its most successful year ever and was set on a expansionary trajectory that was to last at least a decade.3
He was, it seems, always well informed; when pressed by authorities his knowledge of the world of mining was sufficiently extensive for him to be able to persuade the police, as he had on the Rand, that he was a miner by profession. The fact that he had only one arm added to the plausibility of the story in an era marked by horrific mining accidents and helped account for his otherwise puzzling presence around mine properties. But he was no miner; he was a professional thief.
For the dedicated safe-lifter, safe-blaster and gold thief to succeed required more than a basic understanding of the economics, geography and technology of the mining industry. He needed to have a keen appreciation of the class, ethnic composition and culture of the labour force as a whole, and understand how and where the men were deployed in the mining and refining processes. He also had to have a ‘feel’ for ways in which the economic problems, personal proclivities and social fracture lines amongst the miners – as manifested in more relaxed off-the-job settings – might enable him to move in and recruit promising individuals for the disciplined teamwork that marked out organised crime. Moreover, he had to be certain that any proceeds from the wholesale theft of gold could be safely disposed of through a secure and reliable chain of retailers made up of goldsmiths, jewellers or money-lenders who were often drawn from an unfamiliar and therefore ‘untrustworthy’ ethnic stratum. There was more to his business than met the eye. Meeting all these requirements was difficult enough in the Anglophone British colonies such as Australia, New Zealand or southern Africa. In India, where a multiplicity of classes, cultures and ethnic groupings rendered a tiny handful of transient Europeans a subject for demographic mockery, it proved nigh impossible.
Given the climate and undulating nature of the countryside, British residents were occasionally lulled into describing the Kolar goldfields as ‘Little England’. It was wishful thinking. Most of the white managerial staff were ‘pukka’ English but the vast majority of the miners living in bungalows along the more elevated landscaped parts of the mine properties were Celts, Cornish ‘hard-rock’ men, and the rest Italians. Immediately below the Europeans, on an aristocratic ladder of colour and social status constructed largely by the industry itself, stood numerous Anglo-Indians – the mixed-race human outcomes of countless cultural collisions between the sexes that were seldom forged from a basis of equality. On the lowest rung stood semi- and unskilled workers drawn from the ranks of the indigenous population from the surrounding provinces of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. They occupied huts laid out along ethnically divided ‘lines’ as determined by the management. As elsewhere in the world it was the locals – the natives of Mysore – who most fiercely resisted the demand for cheap labour to undertake dangerous work.4
The pool of indigenous labour, divided unequally between those hired by outside contractors and used for specialised operations underground, and those employed by the companies themselves, was extremely culturally diverse. Many of the least skilled workers were Adi Dravidas – ‘untouchables’ – some of whom had sought to avoid their caste-fate by converting to Buddhism or Christianity and who had been recruited by unscrupulous touts operating in the drought-prone Arcot region of Tamil Nadu. Skilled work, including blasting and carpentry, was undertaken by ‘Maplahs and Malayalees’, the latter from Kerala. And, as in other parts of the labour-repressive domains of imperial mining, it was men of militant disposition, those drawn from groups with a warrior tradition – ‘Muslims and Punjabis’ from the north – who were deputed to oversee the ‘ward and watch establishments’ of a large security apparatus.5 McLoughlin would have understood divisions of these types from his experience on the Rand.
The social universe of the Indian labouring poor also manifested one or two other features that any working-class Mancunian would have recognised. Sowcars, short-term money-lenders, provided cash-strapped unskilled labourers with credit at rates so exorbitant that many workers were, in effect, locked into a system of debt-slavery that indirectly benefited the mine owners. Underground gang foremen, maistries, skilled workers and shop-keepers were alternative sources of credit for the working poor.6 Yet more money-suckers of a type familiar to the readers of Germinal were to be found around mines in the usual guises and numbers. Liquor-sellers worked out of the grog or ‘toddy’ shops and prostitutes in small brothels.7
But the pathologies of extreme poverty generate their own antibodies, most frequently through crimes against property. The systematic theft of mine stores and supplies, especially small items such as candles that could be put to use by the workers or sold to those in even greater need, was an everyday occurrence. McLoughlin, however, was interested only in dynamite and gold; items that might help support his lifestyle. There was no shortage of dynamite. Despite a semi-private police force of nearly 200 men and Magistrates who were inclined to guard the quasi-independent legal status of their courts quite fiercely, mines on the Kolar goldfields lost significant quantities of explosives through theft each year.8
By March 1895, sufficient dynamite of murky provenance was being conveyed on public transport systems to warrant the government issuing a notice ‘recommending’ that explosives not be allowed aboard boats, carriages or trains carrying fee-paying passengers.9 As in Rhodesia, which he had passed through the previous year, indigenous workers sometimes used dynamite for ‘fishing’. It was a practice that he was well aware of: months later, when found in possession of dynamite in New Zealand, he told the Magistrate that he had used the explosive for fishing in India. Indeed, it was entirely probable that the dynamite he was by then lugging around with him had come from half a world away – from the Kolar mines.10
If so, it underlined the fact that in India, quite unlike the early Witwatersrand, dynamite was never central to gold theft. In Johannesburg, a few gangs of immigrant whites stole huge quantities of gold from safes, but in India hundreds of indigenous workers purloined minute quantities of the yellow metal from all along the production line. In Kolar, right from the advent of modern mining in the early 1880s, labourers appropriated anything from gold-bearing ore through to amalgam in tiny amounts. They waited until they had accumulated marketable quantities before disposing of them through the scores of indigenous goldsmiths and jewellers to be found throughout the fields. Like African labourers who secreted gems about their person in the diamond mines of southern Africa, Indian workers, too, were ordered to bend over, ‘to see if gold was stuffed into the arse’.11
It was hardly surprising then that, in Kolar, there was no recorded instance of a gold heist being perpetrated by armed Europeans intent on safe-lifting and safe-blasting to acquire gold or amalgam. The way the precious metal occurred, the nature of the production and refining processes, all militated against it. So, too, did the scale of theft perpetrated by an indigenous working class that enjoyed privileged cultural and linguistic access to retail purchasers of most illicitly acquired gold. Gold theft did gather momentum during the time that McLoughlin was in Mysore, however. In 1897, months after he had left, the companies persuaded the princely authorities to pass the repressive Mysore Mine Regulations, containing provisions designed to curb the ‘leakage’ of gold.12 But Bangalore was no frontier settlement and the Kolar goldfield was surrounded by a centuries-old indigenous industry.
* * *
With little Krugersdorp cash left to draw on after the long haul across the western Indian Ocean and without access to an ethnic or criminal network capable of sustaining him through lean times, McLoughlin was soon locked into a downward spiral. The appeal of cheap liquor stores owned by locals may not have helped.13 His status as a ‘vagrant’ or ‘mean white’ – as rootless English-speaking Europeans in both India and the American South were sometimes referred to – may have been miserable, but not unique. After the Napoleonic Wars each decade saw a significant number of down-and-out adventurers, former sailors or soldiers and unskilled labourers abandoning ships in Indian ports to try their luck on the subcontinent. Most took their chances in Bombay, Calcutta or Madras; others wandered farther afield.14
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, this relatively free and easy tolerance of the presence of low-class whites by officialdom began to give way to a more defined attitude and interventionist mode on the part of the emerging state. There were two major reasons for this. First, after the Great Revolt of 1857, the administration not only strengthened its military profile, but also became more sensitive to the need to enhance and protect the image of the thinly spread representatives of the ruling race across a vast country populated by millions of ‘others’. Act 21 of 1869, the European Vagrancy Act, allowed for the provision of temporary shelter for the many down-and-out whites who would also be assisted in their attempts to find employment.
Second, after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the growing deployment of steamships over the decades that followed, India’s financial fortunes became more firmly integrated not only into an Indian Ocean Basin in which time and distance were shrinking, but also into the greater global economy. Precious metal discoveries in various parts of Australasia in the 1850s, followed by first diamonds in 1870, and then huge gold deposits in South Africa, in the 1880s, helped to prime the economies of the far south and laid down the first flimsy threads of a hemisphere-wide labour market for skilled and semi-skilled Anglophone workers.15 The counter-eddies triggered by these movements brought both more artisanal skills and more of Europe’s poor to India’s shores. When the Vagrancy Act, which already made provision for the voluntary deportation of destitute whites, was amended in 1874, it brought growing numbers of ‘Americans, Australians, Continental Europeans as well as white South Africans under its purview’.16
The modest flows of white labour across the southern hemisphere, including a trickle into India, remained largely unregulated by states as yet to be convinced of the need for passports in an imperial world insistent on ‘free trade’.17 But it also brought with it some unintended consequences for governments and benefits for the criminal classes – who, as ever, were among the first to embrace the opportunity of increased mobility via the railways and steamships. Any increase in the number of transient skilled English-speaking workers in large cities such as Bombay, Calcutta and Madras provided antisocial elements, fugitives from justice and ‘undesirables’ with some of the social cover needed for criminal activities in an otherwise alien setting. The fact that India was not a colony of European settlement and therefore not fully integrated into the wider empire in administrative terms meant that there was no easy way of determining the criminal antecedents of unwanted whites arriving on the subcontinent.18 McLoughlin may have badly misread the potential of the Kolar fields, but it would not have taken him long to figure out that the best way of recovering his position was by obtaining a state-subsidised passage out of India and back into the realms of the expanding southern Anglophone world.19
By the 1890s, many, perhaps most large cities in India had a small but well-established number of charities and state institutions seeking to relieve the everyday plight of rootless white men stranded on the subcontinent. It was in the great urban encrustations of Bombay and Calcutta, however, that ‘mean whites’ and vagrants stood the best chance of being seen by the authorities as constituting an embarrassment to the ruling class and being voluntarily deported ‘home’. For the small minority wishing to reach African shores and the far larger numbers hoping to return to Europe via Suez, the west-facing port of Bombay was the obvious place to make for.20
Calcutta, however, had long been an interim destination for that unloved rag-bag of European humanity that saw a future of sorts for itself in India, the Far East or further south and east where the Indian Ocean Basin gave way to the great watery domain of the Pacific. This latter circuit had acquired added importance and a new momentum after the Great Revolt when the revamped Indian army developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for sturdy mounts drawn from the antipodes. After 1857, large numbers of horses known as ‘Walers’ were imported from New South Wales and New Zealand, attended to on the long sea passage north by adventurous or financially hard-pressed young white grooms who at best were semi-skilled. Once the horses had been delivered to ports in India, however, many of these grooms, believing that it would improve their lot in life, deserted their positions only to find that decent employment and an acceptable lifestyle was just as elusive in India as it had been back in the antipodes, thus giving rise to a new counter-current of deportations home.21
For McLoughlin, intent on staging a retreat from the goldfields via Madras in the hope of eventually being deported from Calcutta in order to link up with brother Tommy in Australia, these official policies and practices posed a few formidable challenges. Vagrants in Madras and the southern provinces of India were often either sent to Bombay, or voluntarily made their way there, because it made the cost of deportation to Europe significantly cheaper and more convenient for the administration than from east-coast cities.22 If McLoughlin, travelling under the assumed name of ‘Thomas Kenny’, was to avoid being sent to Bombay he had to elude the attention of officials in Madras and Hyderabad while heading north for Calcutta.23
Moving about for the first time without so much as even a first name to hint at his true identity, let alone where he hailed from, he used the railway to haul him to West Bengal and got there in short order. Indeed, he may have been on the banks of the Hooghly as early as the first week of July 1895, where, although six months and many thousands of miles away from Johannesburg, he would have felt at home among the many dissolute ex-sailors.24 A one-armed man, destitute and dishevelled, offered the police a tale plausible enough for them to agree to recommend his deportation.
‘Home,’ he told the authorities on the basis of information acquired first-hand during his loop through Australia in 1882–85, was Melbourne. As the month of July drew to a close, the Commissioner of Police wrote to the Department of Finance, asking that the latter underwrite the cost of sending Thomas Kenny back to his country of origin. The bureaucrats, easily persuaded, agreed to cover the cost of a passage that would not exceed 150 rupees and additional expenditure amounting to 26 rupees. The latter included the price of a new suit of clothing and – rather alarmingly for ‘Mr Kenny’ – a photograph for the official record. Although not much interested in the criminal antecedents of those they were called upon to deport, wary clerks were keen to avoid having the exercise or expense repeated down the line.25
On Wednesday morning, 31 July 1895, Thomas Kenny, decked out in a smart new outfit notable for a pair of white trousers of the type that he preferred, and clutching a small cloth bag containing a few personal items, was escorted to the dockside by a policeman. From time spent in the navy he had learnt to expect little from the authorities and had steeled himself for a long and potentially uncomfortable voyage on some old tub spluttering south. He had no idea what route the ship would be following to Melbourne and grew ever more resigned when the constable informed him that the ship was on charter and set to return to India carrying a cargo of horses.
As they made their way along the banks of the brown and muddied Hooghly countless dock workers – like a small army of ants around the remains of an earthworm they were intent on ripping apart and devouring – scurried about emptying a line of vessels. The innards were then conveyed to adjacent warehouses amidst much chattering. He enjoyed the stroll and the idea of a man ‘wanted for murder’ being seen off by the police as he embarked on a voyage paid for by the state to a port of his choice. The mounting sense of pleasure was compounded when they halted beside a modern cargo steamer gleaming so brightly that, for a second or two, he may have imagined the smell of fresh paint rising above the stench of the harbour waters. It was magnificent.
They mounted the gangplank, boarded the Mount Sirion, and the constable introduced ‘Mr Kenny’ to a member of the crew who made the passenger’s presence and destination known to the captain. Kenny was not alone. There were a few other passengers, including a woman and child, but the captain was comfortable with a man who, long before the misfortune of losing a limb, had himself been a sailor. The officers were, almost to a man, English; the rest of the crew – as was to be expected – Indian Lascars.
Lifted by the rising tide, the Mount Sirion cast off and slid away down the Hooghly, making her way slowly east, towards one of the many sandy mouths of the great Ganges. At 5.00 pm the following afternoon, with the sun showing signs of doubting whether or not it should linger, the vessel cleared the Sundarbans where the river, exhausted by its long journey to the sea, finally collapsed into the Bay of Bengal.26 On deck, with the failed experience of India and Kolar behind him, ‘Mr Kenny’ sensed the possibilities of a whole new world opening up as the Mount Sirion started shifting and swaying to the rhythm of the open ocean. The wind picked up and he retreated to his cabin below. He eased open the door to the locker, removed the cloth bag, opened it and then rummaged around to find the principal tool of his trade. Satisfied that the dynamite was there, he stowed it away snugly, up against the ship’s hull. He remained convinced that they were in for a fine voyage and he was ready to start his new life.