‘Everything is sudden in India,’ recalled an English woman about the early twentieth century, ‘the sudden twilights, the sudden death. A man can be talking to you at breakfast and be dead in the afternoon.’ It had always been so. In 1805 one visitor reported that he had twice lunched with men whose burials he had been invited to attend before supper that same day.1 When an epidemic arrived at a station, people began measuring their lives in hours: they went to the Club ‘each evening apprehensive to know who was missing from the night before’.2 Death was so familiar to the British in India, so quick and so frequent, that there hardly seemed room for prolonged grief. If an officer died on campaign, his belongings were auctioned as soon as the funeral was over: horses, clothes, revolver, even his cooking-pot and his water-bottle.
The early mortality rates were extraordinarily high. According to the chaplain Thomas Ovington, the British in Bombay at the end of the seventeenth century had a saying, ‘Two monsoons are the age of man.’ Many young men did not get beyond one. The British population of Bombay in that era remained static and even decreased in years such as 1692, when the number of deaths far outweighed the combined total of births and new arrivals. As P. J. Marshall has shown, well over half the Company’s servants in the eighteenth century died in India; in the decades before Plassey (1757) a full two-thirds of those who went out as Writers eager to make their fortune never saw Britain again.3 Corresponding from Calcutta in the 1760s, Mrs Nathaniel Kindersley claimed that women died from ‘violent fevers’ less often than men because they lived ‘more temperately’ and exposed themselves ‘less in the heat of the day’.4 Yet they still died in large numbers; the few who arrived for the first time in middle age were very likely to die within a year. Perhaps half the Britons who went to India in the eighteenth century survived for fewer than five years. Fourteen of the thirty ensigns who joined the Company’s armies in 1775 were dead before they could become lieutenants in 1780: none of them had died in battle.5
The statistics took a long time to improve. Between 1796 and 1820, 1,243 officers of the Bengal Army were killed or died on service in India; only 203 – one seventh of the total – retired on a pension.6 In the other ranks, the mortality rate for British soldiers in India in the first half of the nineteenth century was again very high: an annual average of sixty-nine per thousand, though by 1882 it had been reduced to a quarter of this ratio.7 But the overall statistics do not have the same impact as burial registers and cemeteries revealing evidence in more human terms. According to those at Dinapur, where the South Wales Borderers were stationed, in the years 1817–18 the regiment lost one officer, six NCOs, ninety-six private soldiers and more than sixty women and children.8
British soldiers in India died more often from disease than from enemy action, but they were of course killed and wounded in their hundreds at Assaye and Seringapatam, in the invasions of Afghanistan and the campaign in Mesopotamia, and in the Sikh wars at Ferozeshah, Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Many soldiers also died fighting in the Rebellion of 1857–8 and, in fewer numbers, on the frontiers, on expeditions into the tribal areas and sometimes in camp, attacked in the dark when on sentry duty. British civilians were also victims of violence, dozens of them killed in the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ in 1756 and in the Patna Massacre of 1763, and in larger numbers at the beginning of the Rebellion in 1857, at Delhi, Meerut, Jhansi, Lucknow and above all Kanpur, where several hundred men, women and children were massacred. Some families were virtually wiped out. The Greenways of Kanpur lost nineteen of their members.9
Thirty-four members of the ICS were killed during the Rebellion, and eight more died of illnesses incurred during the fighting. In subsequent decades civil servants were only occasional targets. As Harcourt Butler told his father in 1891, Indians ‘don’t often go for magistrates fortunately’.10 Political shootings, carried out by revolutionary Bengali nationalists, became more common between the world wars. In 1928 a magistrate was stabbed to death in Chittagong by a bogus petitioner who had intrigued the official by putting the words ‘Lord Byron’ on his calling card.11 In the early 1930s three consecutive district officers of Midnapore were assassinated, one when inspecting an exhibition of local crafts, another through a window at a meeting of the district board, and the third as he walked on to the pitch to play football. Civilians were not the only targets of the revolutionaries in Bengal: the victims of 1930 included the inspector-general of police (F. J. Lowman), who was murdered in a Dacca hospital, a police inspector (mistaken for Lowman’s successor) and the inspector-general of prisons, who was shot dead in the Writers Building in Calcutta, the heart of the Bengal government. A few months later, the magistrate of Tipperah was shot on his verandah by two teenage girls pretending to hand him a petition. Retirement to Britain did not necessarily give a man immunity. In 1940, two decades after he had retired as lieutenant-governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer was assassinated in London.
Life was generally more dangerous, for both Politicals and army officers, on the frontiers. As we have seen, officials were quite often killed in the north-east in disputes with various tribes and on one occasion with the Manipuri royal family. In the north-west, when they were not victims of ‘raiders’ or tribal attacks, officers were often assassinated by individuals for motives that seemed incomprehensible unless ascribed to Islam. The easiest way to explain such deaths, at least on a gravestone, was to state that the victims had been struck down by a ghazi or religious ‘fanatic’. A commissioner of Peshawar was killed by a ‘religious fanatic’ when hearing a petition; a Resident at Tonk was murdered in his sleep by a Mahsud sentry apparently incited by a tribal mullah.
British men in India devised various self-inflicted means of getting themselves killed. Perhaps the most absurd was duelling, a mainly eighteenth-century way – often ending in death – of satisfying a man’s honour after an insult, a gambling debt or the discovery that someone had taken ‘unwarrantable liberties’ with his wife. Although the East India Company tried to prohibit the practice, it could hardly succeed when even the governor-general (Warren Hastings) felt obliged to fight his impossible colleague Philip Francis (whom he wounded) in 1780. One problem was that sensible men felt that they would be ostracized if they refused a challenge even when they were clearly in the right. When governor of Madras (1781–5), Lord Macartney was wounded in a duel with one of his councillors, who demanded satisfaction for an alleged ‘offensive expression’, and on his return to England he was again wounded after being forced to fight a general he had dismissed and sent home.
Other activities with steady casualty rates were sports. The most lethal, because the most indulged, was the apparently harmless pastime of riding. Murray’s Handbook to the Punjab warned travellers that before 1875 ‘at least 22 ladies and gentlemen [had been] killed by falling over precipices at Simla’ with their ponies or horses. Riders died in the same way at Dalhousie, Landour and other hill stations; Rudyard Kipling’s horse Joe broke out of his stable one night at Dalhousie and fell to his death down a precipice. All the equestrian sports claimed their fatalities: racing, polo, pig-sticking (though not as many as one might have expected) and jackal-hunting: the master of the Peshawar, a colonel in the IMS, was drowned in 1919 while taking hounds over the River Nagoman. Sometimes, as with ‘pig’, the hunted turned on their pursuer. Men were killed by tigers, panthers and bears, often after they had wounded them. A man would shoot a tiger and follow it into the jungle or long grass, where the injured beast would jump out at him. In 1865 Lord Edward St Maur died near Mysore after his leg was amputated following a hand-to-hand struggle with a bear he had wounded.12
In India people drank themselves to death and killed themselves in other ways, as they did in Britain, and for many of the same reasons: for professional worries or debt or because their business had gone under; because of depression or ‘mental aberration’; because they could not cope with bereavement or marital infidelity. But heat coupled with loneliness added an extra category in India. Suicides tended to take place in the hot weather, often in remote areas, and they were more common in the military, among young officers and young soldiers in the ranks, than in most civilian professions.* Yet they also occurred in the mountains. Army suicides at the small Senchal cantonment near Darjeeling were so frequent in the mid-nineteenth century that the burial ground was known as ‘suicide cemetery’. In the belief that the soldiers’ depression was caused by cold winters and damp mists, the cantonment was moved.13
The Himalaya may have been regarded as the healthiest regions of India, but they still contained dangers to human lives. Darjeeling was prone to landslips brought on by heavy rain: one in 1899 engulfed the Methodist school, killing ten pupils and taking the lives of dozens of other people in the town. Naini Tal was even more prone, and a landslip in 1880 (coinciding with a small earthquake) took the Victoria Hotel and its residents plus several other buildings down the hill and into the lake: 151 people were killed, including forty-three Britons. Earthquakes were even more widespread and often more damaging. Two of the worst seismic disasters – in which Britons died in their scores and Indians in their tens of thousands – happened at Dharamsala in 1905 and Quetta in 1935.
Captain Hervey of the Madras Infantry was apt to be censorious, often with reason, of British habits on the Subcontinent. When a man died in India, he reported, the ‘melancholy circumstance’ was always attributed to ‘the baneful effects of the climate’, whereas, ‘if the truth be known’, he had often been ‘carried off by his own indiscretion’.14 Hervey was writing of the 1840s, when his fellow-countrymen were slowly starting to be more sensible about their health. In the 1680s Thomas Ovington noted how fevers often came ‘after a strong Debauch’. Others also made the connection without having much influence on eating and drinking habits before the nineteenth century. After Rose Aylmer arrived in Calcutta in 1798, William Hickey cautioned this ‘very charming and lovely girl’ not to eat too much of ‘that pernicious and dangerous fruit, the pineapple’, but apparently she ignored his advice, was consequently ‘attacked with a most severe bowel complaint’, and died.15 We do not know if the poor girl really succumbed to ‘a surfeit’ of pineapples – more likely she died of cholera – but we do know that the self-indulgent Hickey was lucky not to succumb to heart failure or disease of the liver.
In India the British died of course of diseases that might have killed them in Britain, including tuberculosis, smallpox, cancer, tetanus and hepatitis. In 1942, just after he had been appointed governor of Assam, Edmond Blandy was diagnosed with lung cancer, but he had become ill not as a result of living in India but as a consequence of smoking British cigarettes.* Yet there were also illnesses and diseases in India that would seldom or never have killed people in Britain. There were also circumstances in which death might have been avoided if the victim had not been struck down in a place without a doctor, if a man with appendicitis could have been taken to a hospital by car instead of travelling thirty miles in a bullock-cart and dying of a burst appendix on the way.17 In his poem ‘The Land of Regrets’ Alfred Lyall described the sick Englishman in the mofussil. He was addressing India.
Thou hast racked him with duns and diseases,
And he lies, as thy scorching winds blow,
Recollecting old England’s sea breezes
On his back in a lone bungalow.
In India many Britons died alone, in the jungle or in remote stations, without anyone to comfort them or listen to what they were trying to say in their final moments.
The most common disease for the British was malaria (sometimes known as ‘jungle fever’), but it was not the most fatal. Numerous people died of it when they were in India or after being invalided home to Britain, but most victims survived despite recurring and debilitating attacks. A less common but more avoidable malady was heatstroke (sometimes known as sunstroke), when the body overheats but is unable to sweat. Not that it was always caused by men heedlessly exposing themselves to the sun. In 1872 the magistrate at Roorkee got it after spending too much time on his elephant, which had got stuck in the sand; he left a widow of thirty-four with nine children.18 In the summer of 1916, in the worst disaster of its kind, nineteen British soldiers packed into third-class coaches died of it in a train running from Karachi across the Sind desert.
There were a number of killer scourges in India, including dysentery, beriberi and blackwater fever. But the most fatal ones were typhoid (then known as enteric fever), which killed off its victims with a relentless regularity, and cholera, which could swoop on a cantonment and wipe out half a battalion. Cholera was an erratic, almost capricious disease, seeming sometimes to choose men lying in alternate beds in a barracks dormitory. In an epidemic at Meerut in 1867, the 3rd Regiment of Foot (the ‘Buffs’) lost 129 soldiers and 59 women and children; and there were many harsher statistics.19 When cholera hit a camp or a cantonment, soldiers and camp followers woke up each morning wondering if it would be their last. Battalions pursued a policy known as ‘cholera dodging’ – continuously moving camp, if possible to higher ground – but it was not an effective measure because (unbeknown to them) they were not combating an airborne disease.
Cholera was no respecter of military rank. During the Rebellion of 1857 it killed the commander-in-chief, General Anson, as he marched to Delhi, and his successor, General Barnard, when he was besieging the city. Nor did illnesses and diseases discriminate on the basis of class or affluence. In the nineteenth century cholera killed two governors of Madras (Thomas Munro and George Ward), and typhoid carried off a third (Lord Hobart). Cholera also killed a Bombay governor’s wife, Lady Fergusson, whose husband outlived her for twenty-five years before he died in an earthquake in Jamaica in 1907. Three successive governor-generals (Dalhousie, Canning and the first of the Elgins) died not from disease but from ill health and the stress of the job (the first two soon after their return to Britain); Lady Dalhousie died at sea, while Lady Canning died in India of malaria. Anglican bishops in India may have been relatively immune to disease, but they tended to die prematurely, quite often in watery circumstances. The great Bishop Heber of Calcutta (author of such resounding hymns as ‘Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning’) died in his bath, one of his successors, Bishop Cotton (founder of the hill schools), was drowned in a river, while another (Bishop James) died during a voyage and was buried at sea. Among other early bishops of Calcutta, one (Thomas Middleton) died of heatstroke, and another (John Turner) succumbed to an unspecified fever.20
Funerals at sea could be even more harrowing than they were on land, perhaps because passengers and crew could not avoid being present – or close by – when the coffin was ‘consigned to the deep’. And there were disproportionately more of them, chiefly because so many people in poor health were advised to go home – or were sent on sick certificate – when it was already too late. Sometimes it was their own fault: they could not bear to be parted, even on doctor’s orders, from a husband, a wife, a mistress or their children; or they wanted to finish a project or make one more lakh of rupees for their retirement. Some stayed so long that they did not even reach the ship, dying on the way to Calcutta or Bombay. Between 1892 and 1896 three successive Agents to the Governor-General in Baluchistan (the most senior official there) died in office, on the very eve of demission. Like many men in India, they had not realized when it had become too dangerous to stay.
William Hickey, that colourful chronicler of the good, the bad and the tragic in Calcutta, noted the deaths of acquaintances who had left it too late, dying in the capital, or two days out of Madras, or three weeks later on the ocean. Among the many who were ordered home for health reasons and who died at sea were three contemporaries: General Sleeman, famous for his operations against ‘Thuggee’ in the 1830s, who died off Ceylon; General Cubbon, the commissioner and virtual ruler of Mysore for a quarter of a century, who died at Suez; and General Fane, the commander-in-chief, who perished off the Azores. The bodies of most people who died on board ship were buried at sea, but sometimes they were preserved in a cask or puncheon of rum for burial at St Helena or even taken all the way back to England for interment there.
There were more than a thousand British burial grounds in the Indian Empire. The most elaborate, and perhaps the most beautiful, is the South Park Street Cemetery, the last resting place of many of Calcutta’s grandest inhabitants in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: few sites are more evocative of the history of British India than the mausoleums between the trees and their medley of architectural motifs, the cupolas, the pyramids, the obelisks and the classical pillars. Later the taste for such tombs died out, a trend assisted by the arrival of so many more Britons in India and the consequent need for many more graves. An officer who in 1770 might have had a mausoleum would be buried a century later in the ground with a headstone and perhaps a commemorative plaque in a church put up by his fellow officers. After the rains came, grave diggers in a cantonment cemetery took the opportunity of digging a dozen or so extra graves in preparation for future deaths when the ground would be hard again. As funerals usually took place on the same day as the death, this was a wise precaution.
The corpses of officers killed in battle could not be taken back to the regimental headquarters, but they were, when possible, buried with ceremony, the regiment drawn up in square, the bodies placed on gun carriages, not in coffins but with cloaks or quilts covering their uniforms, the cortege proceeding to the burial tope as the band played the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul (and pipers playing a lament if a Scottish regiment was involved), and then the Anglican service, the Presbyterian prayer and three last volleys fired over the grave.21 It was almost obligatory to play the ‘Dead March’ at funerals, for NCOs and private soldiers as well as officers, as the procession made its way to the cemetery, where in due course a tombstone would record that ‘The Strife is o’er, the Battle done’ or perhaps, in post-Tennysonian times, ‘God’s finger touched him, and he slept.’ After the burial the band would try to dispel the gloomy atmosphere by playing comic songs and light-hearted airs, but the ploy did not always succeed. However beautiful and moving Handel’s march may sound in the opera house, listening to the ‘continuous drone’ several times a day during a cholera epidemic made people even more depressed and terrified, especially the patients in the hospital. In such circumstances sensible COs banned the music; when the colonel and the adjutant of the 62nd died of cholera on the same day, the regimental band decided of its own accord not to play it.22
One tomb at the South Park Street Cemetery contains the remains of four children of the Twisden family, who died between 1820 and 1827, none of whom reached the age of two. In the same cemetery are buried seven children of the Hermitage family, who died over the twenty years from 1826, only two of them surviving long enough to become teenagers. Tombstones all over India record a similar toll and reveal little discrimination between classes. At Simla a stone slab commemorates the death of three babies of Fred Roberts, the Old Etonian officer who became the commander-in-chief; Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, lost three children in six months. At the time the infant-mortality rate was also high in Britain, though not so extreme. So was death in childbirth, but it too was exacerbated in India by the heat and a lack of medical facilities and later recorded in countless tombstones erected by a ‘disconsolate husband’. Women might survive childbirth but die later, still young, worn out by the climate, the loss of children and other problems caused by living in an alien land. Louisa Broughton survived the loss of four infants and several months under siege in the Agra Fort during the Rebellion, but eventually her body gave up and she died at the age of twenty-three, leaving one baby alive.23
The inscriptions on children’s tombstones are poignant and repetitive and almost unbearable to read. Perhaps the easiest to accept are the conventional quotations from the Bible or the prayer book: ‘Thy will be done’, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away’, or the most popular one, sometimes abbreviated, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ How one feels sympathy for parents who accepted the necessary hypocrisy of such sentimental phrases as ‘fell asleep in Jesus’ or ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’ or the ghastly couplet ‘God loved her too and thought it best / To take her home with him to rest’, and then added something real and heartfelt such as ‘Mummy misses baby darling in a hundred different ways.’ One can sympathize very readily too with those people who, unable to understand why such tragedies happened, pointedly put in the half-line ‘God moves in a mysterious way.’
Death and bereavement were much the same in India as in Britain, but in India there was an added poignancy. In Britain people usually lived near the graves of their relations and so could visit them, tend them and leave flowers there; there was even a certain consolation in having members of the same family buried together in the same churchyard. Such conditions did not exist in India except in those few places where there was a settled community such as Kanpur. Most of the British in India lived shifting lives. Their children died and were buried, but they themselves had to move on to the next station, unable to see the graves and yet unable to forget that they were there, untended and unvisited by anyone connected with the child. Often they had taken with them, together with locks of hair and other mementoes, the dried petals of a flower growing on the grave. Over the years they would send money for repair work and the regilding of the inscription, and they would receive letters assuring them that the memorial was being cared for and the weeds had been cleared away. In most cases they would only see it again if they made a special pilgrimage. On 15 August 1947, Independence Day, Robert Baylis, the district judge at Naini Tal, lowered his flag and, ‘after pausing only to visit the grave of a child [he] had lost’ in Kanpur, made his way to Bombay and ‘a slow and dismal voyage to England’.24
Officials in India spent a lot of time thinking about their retirement, dreaming about it, worrying about it, and making many plans. Where would they live? How far would their pension stretch? Above all, how would they fit in and what would they do in a country they may have seen only three or four times in the last thirty years? Britain in the nineteenth century was changing at least as fast as it has done since, and it was bound to feel strange and rather bewildering to be living there again. A man may have gone to India when rail seemed the ultimate means of travel and then returned to find that everyone wanted to fly in the sky or drive like Toad of Toad Hall along the highways.
Yet anxieties in most cases seem to have taken second place to the pleasures of daydreaming. At the end of his day in camp, when he had closed his Dante and put out his lamp, Joseph Goudge used to think of the actors he would see, the concerts he would go to, and the Italian cities he would visit with his new wife.25 Men and women naturally dreamed of the things that they most missed in India. How wonderful it would be to experience a proper Christmas, to eat the real roast bird rather than a peacock or tinned turkey, to see robins, to put up a fir tree, to have holly and mistletoe instead of poinsettias and branches of palm trees. It would be fun to go to shops and buy presents rather than make purchases by mail order or from an occasional pedlar.
As the departure date approached, people often had doubts, and feelings became ambiguous. Henry Beveridge had long been torn between a Scottish ‘burn dancing down under the hawthorns’ and the ‘great, turbid, rolling Hooghly’; the problem was that India had truly ‘burnt itself into him’. Calcutta may not have burnt itself quite so much into William Hickey, but that amiable character felt ‘dejected and gloomy’ about leaving his friends and his city and seeing ‘the melancholy and desponding countenances’ of his favourite servants.26 Leave-takings are sad moments, and they were prolonged in India – especially if the leaver was eminent – by farewell dinners with toasts and speeches to commemorate a man’s work, by public receptions and appreciative ‘addresses’, and by people from the local community – Indian as well as British – accompanying him to the station to see him board the train to Bombay. ‘How sad a business’ it was, one official told Lord Elgin before sailing home in 1896, ‘to break the chain of the work and associations of one’s lifetime’.27 And if the departures took place at the end of the Raj, there was an extra poignancy that went beyond the personal. In 1947 the boxwallah Wilfrid Russell visited the Residency at Kashmir and was sitting in the drawing room when ‘a wave of emotion passed through’ him, a sudden ‘sadness at the imminent passing of all this’, a realization that
it would all be forgotten in a few years – the accumulated knowledge, experience and sacrifice of generations of Englishmen and women, who had spent their lives far from home serving a cause in which they had believed, even if it was now being questioned by new, perhaps less fortunate, generations of their own people. It was like finding oneself in an old English country house, still full of treasures of past generations, soon to come under the hammer in order to pay death duties.28
Farewells were easier for private soldiers, most of whom hadn’t been there for long, hadn’t wanted to go in the first place, had enjoyed few perks and luxuries while they were there, and were leaving because their time was up or their regiment was being sent elsewhere. Private Clemens of the East Yorkshires, whom we last saw in Lucknow in 1935, returned to England after his six-year term in the same ship he had come out on. He left a brief, unsentimental, matter-of-fact description of his arrival and discharge. He and his mates were transported to the regimental depot at Beverley, where they received their pay and discharge papers in the orderly room, and then went to the barrack room where a van from Burton the tailors had brought them some clothes to try on: ‘we were soon dressed in “civvies” again’.29
Private Swindlehurst of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whom we last knew in Lahore in 1920, was not sad to leave Bombay with its filth and beggars and ‘prowling women’. From being assistant butcher on the way out, he now became chief butcher on the home voyage, but apart from fulfilling that duty he spent the time boxing, wrestling, playing cards and singing songs. When the ship reached the Channel and passed Swanage, the men started singing ‘Way down upon the Swanee River’, and although it was January and the ship docked in Southampton under a grey sky and a cold wind, Swindlehurst was glad to be back and feel ‘a drop of good English rain’. That first evening home he and his mates longed for a ‘fish and tatty shop’ and roamed the streets asking Southampton’s ‘natives’ – who could not understand ‘broad Lancashire’ – where they might find one. In the end they settled for a sausage-and-mash shop and a lot of beer, which sent them to bed still singing ‘Swanee River’. In a few days they were issued with rifles, which made them wonder if they were about to be sent to Ireland, a dangerous place for a soldier early in 1921. It was soon confirmed that Dublin was indeed the destination, via Crewe and Holyhead, a posting that meant a routine of patrolling streets and curfews. When they reached the Irish city, the ranks were given a lecture about not sleeping with the ‘Colleens’.30
Private soldiers coming home with their battalion after a few years in India found it less difficult to adjust than men and women who were returning as couples or as individuals after three decades away. From the moment a retired Civilian stepped ashore, he would notice changes and differences: small things usually, such as fashions in facial hair, in beards, whiskers and moustaches, or the replacement of monocles and pince-nez by spectacles. He might descend the gangway in a winged collar and straw boater to find that everyone on shore was wearing soft shirts and caps or homburgs. Such changes might be subtle and unimportant in themselves, but they would remind him that he was in many ways a stranger, that he did not quite ‘belong’, that his homeland had been changing while he was absent in ways he had been excluded from.
Almost invariably the first thing returning exiles grumbled about was the weather; it is remarkable how many of them happened to disembark in fog and drizzle. Further disappointment or disillusionment soon followed. Transport was of course more expensive than in India, and much less dignified, especially on the London Underground. Homes they could afford were a good deal smaller than they were used to, and domestic help, so smiling and abundant in India, was comparatively scarce and expensive. The feelings of many an officer and official were nicely expressed by a fictitious character, Colonel Dewes in A. E. W. Mason’s novel The Broken Road: ‘one misses more than one thought to miss, and one doesn’t find half what one thought to find’. Dewes expressed another feeling that would have been familiar to readers who had lived in India: in England, he said, ‘one felt a stranger … one had lost one’s associations’.31
A number of senior officials (to be mentioned later) acquired comparably influential jobs after their retirement. Most of them did not, and in consequence felt impotent and unimportant. They may have fought battles or dug canals or governed millions of people, but their compatriots in Britain seldom wanted to know about their exploits or to help put their skills to some domestic use. When Olaf Caroe returned in 1947, feeling that ‘the meaning had gone out of life’, he was only fifty-four and in need of some occupation. Yet although he had recently been foreign secretary in Delhi and governor of the north-west, neither the Foreign Office nor any other institution wished to employ this talented individual.32 Caroe’s case was not unusual or limited to the period of Independence. In the nineteenth century G. O. Trevelyan noted what a ‘severe trial’ it was for a ‘leader of Calcutta society’ to ‘become one of the rank and file in the pump room at a watering-place’ and to ‘sink … from the High Court to the Petty Sessions’. The sense of anonymity did not diminish. When one ICS officer retired to East Anglia after 1947, he expected folk there to mistake him for an employee of the Ipswich Co-operative Society.33
Many people soon realized how ill adapted they were to life in Britain. As a woman who returned in 1946 later admitted, India had made her ‘a completely useless person’, unable to cook a meal, clean her house, wash her clothes or make a fire.34 * Feelings of inadequacy, combined with lack of recognition and even of interest, led naturally to a loss of self-esteem which in turn sometimes led to self-assertion, a need to tell unwilling listeners what you had been doing in India, memsahibs going on about the grandeur of their lives in the empire, their husbands in clubs repeating Poona yarns and tiger talk and ‘little Gurkha’ anecdotes. The India bores came in various guises: MPs droning on in the House of Commons, soldiers reminiscing about the frontier, anglers insisting that fishing for mahseer was more exciting than trying to catch salmon. Some returned to their colleges and haunted High Table for the rest of their lives. In the case of Sir Evelyn Howell, who returned in 1932 and lived to be ninety-four, this meant four decades. The obituarist of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where Howell became an honorary fellow, was respectful of his subject’s knowledge of the frontier and his career as governor of Baghdad, Resident first in Waziristan and then in Kashmir, and foreign secretary of the government of India; he related how (in collaboration with Olaf Caroe) he had translated the poems of Khushal Khan, but he declined to mention, perhaps tactfully, that he was a jackal-hunting enthusiast and author of the ‘Peshawar Vale Hunt Song’, which was sung to the tune of the ‘Eton Boating Song’. Yet a slight sense of exasperation can be felt in the description of him ‘discoursing on oriental languages’ or quizzing ‘a don on an unexpected point of philology or literature’, and of the old boy bicycling down the towpath to watch the boat races and behaving as if ‘the fortunes’ of the rowing eights were ‘an index of the health of the whole college’. Revelations that he could ‘exchange compliments … in Latin hendecasyllables or elegiacs’, and that he translated Khushal Khan not only into English but also into Latin Horatian metres, suggest that he was a clever old thing with insufficient opportunities to use his talents. The fellows were grateful to him, however, for revising the college address list.36
An Indian judge who visited London in the 1890s was struck by the enthusiasm people showed when they spoke to him about India, of their fondness for its people and the places where they had spent their careers: they seemed to ‘pine’ for India even more than they had pined for England when they were abroad.37 The British who went to India certainly did a lot of pining. After living in ‘the murk and fog and cold of England’, the daughter of one Company officer recorded, ‘even the burning plains of India’ became ‘dear in the memory’.38 In India, observed Walter Lawrence, one longed for the ‘pleasant pastures of England’, and when one found them one yearned for the colour, the romance and ‘the aromatic breezes of the coral strand’.39 In India the British had found places that reminded them of Devonshire and had tried to create enclaves of Britishness in the Hills; now, when descending a hill down a lane in Devon, they might be reminded of ‘the choicest corners of the old Coonor ghat’.40 Earlier, Devonshire had been part of Fanny Parkes’s disappointment when she returned to England in 1839. The cows were fine, the sheep were fat, and the verdure was rich, but everything after India ‘must appear small by comparison’, and the county was not as hilly as she remembered.41
Many people in Britain seemed to develop a romantic sensibility which they may not have been aware of in India, feeling nostalgic for the twilights and for sleeping under the stars, remembering the scent of frangipani or the smell of smoke from a village by the Ganges, recalling the fall of monsoon rain on parched skin and its smell on parched dust, evoking the sights that again seemed so vivid, fruit bats hanging from the branches of dead mango trees, women in coloured saris plucking tea in bright green fields, cattle being driven back to the villages at sundown, ‘cow dust time’. Even such words as ‘the Frontier Mail’ – like ‘the Flying Scotsman’ – could bring a lump to the throat. And it was not only a middle-class nostalgia. Our friends Clemens and Swindlehurst may not have experienced the feeling – or at least they did not write about it – but others did, including another we now know well, Private Richards. After his return in 1909 the Welch Fusilier acknowledged that English bacon and other food tasted delicious after India, but his ‘delight with home’ soon ‘wore off’, and he was longing to be back with his battalion in the tropics, listening to the ‘croaking of the bull-frogs and the buzzing noise made by the tropical insects’; he even missed the ‘howling of the jackals’ at night. Richards applied to go back, and when informed that, as he was now a reservist, he could not rejoin the Colours, he thought seriously of joining a regiment bound for India under a false name; it was the fear of arrest and the thought of doing a recruit’s training all over again that deterred him.42 *
Bert Rendall of the Somerset Light Infantry was another soldier who could not forget the East. In his nineties his living room at Yeovil was still cluttered with Indian brassware and bric-a-brac, Gurkha kukris, engraved vases and candlesticks in the form of cobras; views of the Khyber Pass, Landi Kotal and other places on the frontier hung on the walls, and a sideboard displayed sepia photographs of Rendall in uniform, the khaki serge he wore in the Murree Hills and the battledress of the later Home Guard.43 In his novel Coming Up for Air George Orwell wrote of lower-middle-class interiors in the ‘colony’ of British repatriates in Ealing with their carved teak furniture and brass trays and ‘photographs of chaps in sun-helmets’. A grade higher in wealth and class meant the addition of hunting trophies, skins on the floor and antlers on the walls, the head of a tiger or a panther grimacing in a glass case, something made from an elephant (an umbrella stand perhaps) or a crocodile (maybe a desk blotter). General Pearse, who retired in the 1880s, was proud that the head of the biggest sambur he had ever shot presided over his dining room in Cheltenham; James Best found it reassuring that his ‘big buffalo’ should look at him every evening from the top of his stairs as he went to bed.44 A few tried to recreate India – rather than British India – and to do so in a less carnal way: one couple returning from Kalimpong gave their Cotswold farmhouse a ‘distinctly Tibetan interior’. Olaf Caroe, who had retired jobless to Sussex, tried to reproduce ‘a little piece of Kashmir’ in his garden. Regarding the Mughal Gardens as ‘perhaps the ultimate terrestrial paradise’, he and his wife planted some of the same trees, including the chenar and the deodar, and hoped they had ‘won a smile from Nur Jahan’, the Mughal emperor’s wife.45
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In 1787 the Calcutta Gazette said it was sorry to hear of ‘the great disrespect in which East Indians’ were held in Britain.46 The paper was referring to those nabobs who had survived India and returned to Britain with enormous fortunes. Some of their unpopularity could be ascribed to envy of their wealth and the power it gave them; some to their ostentatiousness, the brashness of their manners, their bright and gaudy coats, the rather vulgar ways of displaying their wealth; and some of it was the result of snobbery, the attitude of inalienable landed wealth towards fortunes made ‘in trade’, especially when accumulated by dubious means. Yet even if these attitudes made them resentful and encouraged them to stick together socially, nabobs were successful men, in worldly terms, who in most cases achieved what they had sought: with their fortunes they could buy houses and estates and parliamentary seats. Many of them also became directors of the East India Company.
In subsequent centuries repatriates seldom returned with fortunes or the ability to exert influence on national affairs. A few senior Civilians received colonial governorships, and Charles Metcalfe administered both Jamaica and Canada. Yet none before Independence was given an important diplomatic position except Mortimer Durand, a former foreign secretary in India, and none reached the cabinet, though Anthony MacDonnell, a former lieutenant-governor, became a controversial under-secretary for Ireland (1902–8). Writing before the appointments of Durand and MacDonnell, Alfred Lyall stressed that Metcalfe had been the only man to ‘have made any sort of success in any time of life unconnected with India’. Bartle Frere’s failure in South Africa had been ‘very significant’; although undoubtedly a success as governor of Bombay, he had blundered disastrously as governor of the Cape when he provoked the Zulu War of 1879. Continuing his criticism of the repatriates after India, Lyall pointed out that in ‘parliamentary waters’ they could ‘only just manage to swim’.47 As these were intelligent men with Indian achievements to their name, the most likely explanation for their failures is that India was so vast an undertaking and so debilitating a place that they were physically and mentally too exhausted to cope with further challenges.
At Independence the Foreign Office opened its doors to younger Civilians and Politicals, men still in their thirties or early forties; a number of them duly became ambassadors, although, apart from Humphrey Trevelyan in Moscow, seldom in the senior embassies. The Colonial Office was also receptive, especially to those who wished to go to Africa: several former officers and officials joined the colonial administration in Kenya, the Sudan and both Rhodesias.
In the late summer of 1947 the boxwallah Wilfrid Russell was up at Gulmarg, playing golf with Politicals and officers in the Indian Army, men who had spent their entire careers in India and who were now enjoying a last holiday in Kashmir ‘before departing with their guns, their fishing rods and dogs to Kenya and Rhodesia’.48 For those who feared Britain might be too small, too constricting – and without much for them to do – Africa seemed an exciting alternative: it had space and opportunities and a role in the empire that in the 1940s looked as if it would last longer than it actually did. One could become a game warden or run safaris or continue soldiering by joining the Sudan Defence Force. Yet most went out to farm, and it was a natural transition for tea planters in Assam to become coffee-growers in Kenya: Ursula Graham Bower settled there because her husband had been a planter before the war. Some of these enterprises were evidently successful: at the Nairobi Agricultural Show Colonel Terence Conner, formerly of the Burma Military Police, won the cup for the best wheat grown in East Africa six years in a row.49 Yet many people did not stay in Kenya beyond the Mau-Mau years. Although some also left Rhodesia after the ‘unilateral declaration of independence’ in 1965, one ex-Indian Army officer stayed. Described by a former colleague as ‘an ardent supporter of Ian Smith’, he barricaded himself in his farmhouse on the Zambesi border and ‘lived there surrounded by dogs, rifles and barbed wire’.50
Politicals who had spent their professional lives being transferred from post to post within and beyond the Indian frontier sometimes found it difficult to concentrate on a single country in later life. Jack Bazalgette was one of these restless individuals. After Independence he went to Venezuela as an employee of Shell, then to England to work for Dr Barnardo’s Homes, then to Istanbul to work on a refugee project for the World Council of Churches, and later to Beirut for more work among refugees. Restlessness followed him into retirement. Deciding that they did not want a permanent home, he and his wife gave whatever possessions they had to their children and bought themselves a motor caravan in which to live and travel for the rest of their lives.51
Back in Britain there were some natural positions for retired Civilians to retire to. One was the Home Office, which in early 1947 sent an official to India to interview possible candidates under the age of forty-five; P. D. Martyn, whom we have met at breakfast,* was one Civilian who made the transfer. Another billet, in earlier times, was the India Office. While it employed only a small number of bureaucrats, distinguished former Civilians could be appointed to its Council, which supervised the activities of the government of India, congenial and not very exacting work, although Alfred Lyall complained that it had the same savour as ‘chewed hay’. A less natural place for them, certainly in the eyes of other MPs, was the House of Commons. Retired Civilians were almost bound to be mediocre election candidates – elderly, out of touch and ill informed about domestic politics – and, if victorious in spite of these drawbacks, they almost invariably became poor parliamentarians, long-winded speakers with little understanding of debate. As Curzon unsuccessfully warned one aspiring candidate, the retired Civilian ‘inevitably gravitated into a parliamentary bore’.52
A more promising second career was in academia, for there at least repatriates would be teaching or writing on subjects they knew about: it was logical for a former jungle wallah to join the Forestry Commission in Britain prior to becoming the professor of forestry at Oxford. As we have seen, several political officers in Assam became distinguished anthropologists at Cambridge and SOAS, and a number of retired Civilians were appointed to the Readership in Indian History at Oxford. Another logical occupation was language teaching, especially at universities preparing students for the ICS. An Oxford probationer going to Madras in the 1920s would be taught Tamil or Telugu by Sydney Roberts, a former judge at Cuddalore, while one aimed for Bombay would be taught by C. N. Sneddon ICS who, according to an Indian probationer, spoke Marathi like ‘a dear old Brahmin pandit in Poona’.53 A less obvious post, which Civilians filled with surprising frequency, was that of bursar of schools and universities: St John’s College, Oxford, made a habit of recruiting from this source. Perhaps it was the Civilians’ reputation for probity and administrative efficiency that made them so popular. Penderel Moon joined the ICS in 1929 when he was a fellow of All Souls College; he worked in India for many years after Independence and then returned to All Souls as a fellow and bursar in 1965. The principal fruit of his retirement, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, is one of the longest books ever written on the subject; it was published in 1989, two years after his death.
At Independence some Indian Army officers managed to get themselves transferred to the British Army. Geoffrey Bamford had gone into the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1927, had subsequently joined the Indian Army, and was welcomed back to his Fusiliers in 1947. Yet there were not many places, especially in the infantry, in an army quickly shrinking in the aftermath of the Second World War. Infantry officers from India who wished to continue soldiering often had to become gunners.54 In 1947 there were few openings too in the police, though in earlier times two inspector-generals in Bengal had become commissioners of the Metropolitan Police in London. Yet between the wars a number of policemen who worked as successful decrypters and interceptors of Russian radio traffic were brought from India to work in MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).55 Two of them, Alistair Denniston and John Tiltman, were leading code-breakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.
Repatriates from India were returning to a country where there were not enough jobs for them; they had after all gone away in the first place because they thought their prospects were better abroad. On their return some might go into banking or business or the law, but not in large numbers and seldom with great success: they were usually too old-fashioned, too out of touch and insufficiently qualified. Many retired officials knew this and, unless they still had children to educate, did not aim high; some were content to become magistrates or join the county council; others found congenial and fairly undemanding jobs such as handicapper at Newmarket, rowing correspondent of The Times and curator of the Ipswich Clock Museum. The commonest dream of the official, sweating in Calcutta or baking in the mofussil, was to acquire a smallholding in England and become a farmer. Raising pigs in Cumberland or Red Poll cattle in Somerset had their attractions, but nothing could compete with the vision of an apple orchard, to live in an old rectory, as F. L. Brayne did in Norfolk, and plant fruit trees in a sixty-acre glebe. Not all such agricultural ventures were successful, fortunately perhaps in some cases. On his retirement from the ICS in 1947, Philip Mason tried to combine writing with farming fifteen acres of marginal land in Dorset. The smallholding took up most of his time but gave little in return, and after a struggle he abandoned it and moved his family to London to concentrate on literary work and a job as director of the Institute of Race Relations. His books on British India (in two cases published under the pseudonym Philip Woodruff) are among the most sensitive and well written of those produced by a former Indian administrator.
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Repatriates did not usually decide to live in the places where they had been born and brought up, even if family members still lived in them. Nabobs, needing to be close to East India House and Westminster, often based themselves in Mayfair, in the ‘nabobery’ around Harley Street, from where they could saunter down to the Haymarket to eat curry dishes at the Norris Street Coffee House. Naturally they wanted to have country houses as well, but they usually bought or built these near London, in Berkshire (sometimes known as ‘the English Hindoostan’) or in Surrey. Although the nabobs had acquired and retained Indian tastes, they had no wish to build homes inspired by Indian architecture in Britain. Their archetypal house was Basildon Park in Berkshire, built for Sir Francis Sykes with a Palladian exterior and neoclassical rooms. Among nabob homes only Sezincote in Gloucestershire, bought by Charles Cockerell and remodelled by his brother with the advice of Thomas Daniell in 1805–7, is a recognizably ‘oriental’ building, with ‘Hindoo’ and ‘Mahomedan’ motifs on the exterior and stone Brahmin bulls and a Hindu temple in the garden. Yet even Sezincote’s interior is classical and Georgian.
London was also the natural base for repatriates of later eras, especially the more ambitious ones, although these rarely aspired to Mayfair. Most of them settled in the west, in Bayswater (dubbed ‘Asia Minor’) and South Kensington (sometimes known as ‘the Anglo-Indian quarter’). When contemplating his retirement, Alfred Lyall used to worry about being a forgotten ‘old fogey’ living in a small house in Westbourne Grove; in fact he became a popular figure in society and lived in Kensington in the area around Queensgate and the Cromwell Road, where several former lieutenant-governors of the Punjab also settled. Those who had work in London but wished for less noise and bustle went to suburbs such as Sydenham and Beckenham. There was no particular pattern to suburban settlement except that the most popular places were south of the Thames.
Living in the south of England was the general preference for repatriates, whether in London or in the southern counties. The main exception to this was people working in industry: those from Halifax and Accrington who had gone to run the mills at Kanpur tended to retire to Yorkshire and Lancashire.56 Most others preferred to be in the south, either because they wished to be in or near London or because they desired the warmer climate and lighter winters of the south coast. A belief in the healthy benefits of sea air and sea-bathing persuaded many to settle on the coast and to form colonies in Eastbourne, Hove and St Leonard’s. The favourite retirement counties for retired Civilians were Surrey, because it was close to London, and Devonshire, perhaps for the opposite reason. The last seems to have been a favourite abode for men who did not wish to do much else with their lives except go downhill gently and with dignity, playing a sort of sub-squirearchical role while, as the Civilian Reggie Partridge was described by his granddaughter, ‘disliking everything new, modern or complicated’.57
A survey of ICS members who had joined the service in the last decades of the nineteenth century reveals that their favourite retirement towns were London, Dublin, Oxford (mainly for work), Cheltenham (mainly for leisure) and Camberley.58 Few lived in East Anglia, and even fewer had settled anywhere north of Worcestershire. Dublin contained a number of them, especially from Madras, but Edinburgh and Glasgow had very few. Scotland as a whole presents a mixed picture. Its nabobs tended to retire to London but soothe their consciences with donations to ancestral places north of the Border. William Fairlie gave part of his indigo profits to ‘good causes’ in Kilmarnock; John Forbes built a lunatic asylum in Aberdeen.59 After fifty-four years in India, General Low retired in 1858 but could not face the idea of living in Scotland: he visited his estate in Fife during the summer and lived in Kensington for the rest of the year until in his eighties he gave up both and settled on Brixton Hill.60
Yet that is only part of the story. William Tweedie, a political officer who had served very uncomfortably in Baghdad,* had no difficulty about retiring to his home in Dumfriesshire, where he became a JP. Fraser Noble, who was one of the last members of the ICS, had gone to school in Nairn and decided to retire to that town; he had got a double first at Aberdeen University and decided to return there also, becoming a lecturer and later its vice-chancellor. It was natural too for landowners who had bought or saved estates with money acquired in India to wish to enjoy them in person. John Johnstone, Scotland’s richest nabob, bought several estates with the fortune he had made in Bengal; he duly retired to Scotland and died at one of them, Alva in Clackmannanshire. In the next century John Stewart of Ardvorlich returned to India (where he had been born) to make money not to buy new estates but to save his family’s ancestral one on Loch Earn. He duly did so, after thirty-five years in Kanpur, and retired there.
In 1977, a few months before he died of cancer, Paul Scott won the Booker Prize for his novel Staying On. Unlike the four volumes of his great quartet, it is a short and humorous work, a tragicomedy about a former Indian Army officer and his wife who after Independence had ‘stayed on’ and later retired to a hill station, not because they particularly liked India but because they had got used to it and believed they could live more comfortably there on his salary (from a Bombay commercial firm) and later his pension than they could in Britain. The novel was made into a moving television film, the couple memorably played by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, and has helped leave the impression that the ‘stayers-on’ were a handful of officers and their wives who did not return to Britain in 1947.
In fact the British had been ‘staying on’ in large numbers since the eighteenth century. Old men in the Company days had made their homes there, often with Indian wives and a sprawling family. For William Gardner ‘the summit of happiness’ was what he had in India: his beloved begum plus ‘new books, a garden, a spade, nobody to obey, pyjamas, grandchildren [and] tranquillity’.61 Why would he wish to abandon all this for a long and hazardous sea voyage followed by life in a chilly country where he would now feel a stranger? Before the Mediterranean route to India was opened, old generals and colonels often thought it too much trouble to go ‘home’: in the first third of the nineteenth century many died after living for over fifty years in Bengal without having seen Britain since they were teenagers.62 Surgeons and civil servants of the EIC also remained in India after their careers were over: W. A. Brooke went out as a Writer in 1768 and died at Benares in 1833 at the age of eighty-one. Even men beyond the Company’s radius often found life in India too congenial to abandon. After a career sailing as a ‘free mariner’ in the East Indies, John Pope returned to Bombay and became the city’s sheriff before he died there in 1821. His contemporary, the artist Robert Home, arrived in India in 1791, became the court painter at Lucknow, and retired to Kanpur, where he died in 1834 at the age of eighty-two. Almost all professions contained men who had found their niches in India and did not wish to leave them. We have already met George Faulkner, the canal engineer in Orissa whose culture was English, who spoke no language except English, yet who was determined to live and die at his home in India.63
At any time before the twentieth century the majority of Britons who stayed in India consisted of former private soldiers and NCOs, men who at the end of their service would begin a new profession and then retire on their army pension. Of a group of nine former Company soldiers working in Madras in 1787, one was ‘in trade’, one kept a ‘punch-house’, one ran a livery stable, two were in the arsenal, another two worked in schools, and a further pair was in the service of the nawab of Arcot. A century later, the range of post-military occupations would have expanded to include work on the railways and in the police.
In the 1840s Captain Hervey observed that ‘our old European soldiers’ were ‘very partial to Bangalore’ and that those ‘attached to native women’ liked to retire there. It seemed to him a sensible system until he went to Cuddalore, another retirement station, where he witnessed the ‘poor old fellows’ living in an ‘abject’ state with their ‘black or tawny’ wives; they had no employment and little to do and, instead of using the circulating library, they clustered around the ‘skittle-ground and arrack-shop’ where they gambled, squabbled and then went ‘reeling home in a disgraceful state of intoxication’.64
The East India Company encouraged old soldiers ‘attached to native women’ to retire to certain designated places, usually in or close to a cantonment. This custom continued long after the Company’s demise, and not just for private soldiers with Indian wives. When Harman Luker retired from the Indian police in the 1890s, the family debate was not about which country to go to but which part of India to settle in, whether somewhere in the mountains or in the Plains or along the coast. There was no thought of them living in Britain. Although he came from Gloucestershire, Luker had lived in India for forty years, and his wife Ellen was a ‘country-born’ English woman who had never been to England. The eventual choice was a ‘pukka brick’ bungalow at Dinapur on the Ganges, a military station with several friends among the pensioners and potential husbands in the regiments for their three daughters.65
In a very different category of stayers-on were officers of the Indian Army who in 1947 remained, often from a sense of duty, to help deal with the chaos and tragedy of Partition. Although sickened by the sectarian massacres and demoralized by the collapse of civil authority, some 2,000 of them chose to remain in their posts. The ‘handover’ was not abrupt or indeed resentful, and it did not entail the rapid departure of all British personnel; one regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry, did not leave Bombay until 1948. The independent countries of India and Pakistan each appointed a British commander-in-chief, men who had been contemporaries at Sandhurst and who would have been in a difficult position if war had broken out between the two new states.* Pakistan also had British officers in charge of its navy and its air force as well as a British chief of the general staff, who remained at his post until 1951. While the most senior figures retired or were replaced in the early 1950s, some younger officers stayed for longer. After Independence Colonel James Bell worked for the Pakistan Army as director of military training at Rawalpindi and commandant of the Frontier Force Regimental Centre at Abbottabad. He then became administrative officer of the Pakistan Air Force School and secretary of the Sind Club in Karachi before he left Pakistan in 1960.66
Independent India did not feel the need for so many British officers, although it employed General Stable as quartermaster-general and it kept General Lentaigne, a Gurkha officer who had commanded the Chindits, as the commandant of its Staff College until 1955, when he died; it also employed a British head of its navy until 1957. As by 1947 the ICS was half Indian, Nehru’s administration did not require many British civil servants except on the north-east frontier. Elsewhere it invited a number of Civilians to stay on for a while, including Allan Arthur, a Punjabi district officer who was also asked to work for Pakistan.† Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the minister of education and the arts in Nehru’s interim government (1946–7), appealed to some civil servants to remain in their jobs with the argument that India needed their talent.67 One who responded was Peter Gwynn, an Irishman with Indian nationalist sympathies who served in Madras and Andhra Pradesh until 1967. Yet the province where the British were most needed was Assam, whose new government had few qualified administrators, either as district officers or at a more senior level. Nehru appointed Sir Ronald Lodge as governor in 1949, and T. S. Hayley was implored to stay on as secretary to the Assam government in charge of rural development. Political officers for the tribal areas were also in demand, even if they had retired and returned to Britain. Geoffrey Allen was back in England, depressed by ration books, a dockers’ strike and the difficulty of finding a job, when the Indian government offered him the post of political officer for the Balipara Frontier Tract. He did not hesitate. He and his wife went back and worked among the tribals until worries about his lack of pension persuaded him to take a job with the Indian Tea Association. On learning of his resignation, Nehru (who happened to be in Assam just then) tried to persuade him to change his mind by offering him Indian citizenship (with a pension), but Allen stayed with tea, moving to another post at Shillong and remaining there until he retired in 1970.68
Pakistan had proportionately fewer ‘home-grown’ ICS officers than India, and so its desire to retain – or bring back – British Civilians was stronger. It was also the view of the country’s first leaders, Jinnah and Liaquat Ali, that British officials were needed to restore order and preserve stability in the aftermath of the vast refugee exoduses. In three of Pakistan’s four provinces – West Punjab, East Bengal and the North-West Frontier – Jinnah appointed British former ICS officers as governor: he even cajoled Sir George Cunningham, the ex-rugby international, to come out of retirement in Scotland, where he was now rector of St Andrews University, to resume the governorship of the frontier province which he had held from 1937 to 1946.* If it was unusual for a post-colonial country to appoint officials from the ex-colonial power, at least Jinnah and Liaquat Ali were consistent in the matter. Four Agents to the Governor-General in Quetta – the virtual rulers of Baluchistan – were British, and so were five of the permanent secretaries in the government ministries. Wilfrid Grigson, a remarkable Civilian who had written a book on the Gonds of central India, was brought in as secretary of the Pakistan Refugee Ministry, first in Karachi and then in Lahore, but he was killed in an air crash soon afterwards.
The new civil service of Pakistan was proud to regard itself as the successor of the ICS, and for years its recruiting pamphlet referred to its predecessor as ‘the most distinguished Civil Service in the world’.69 In 1947 the new regime was keen to retain British Civilians at district – as well as gubernatorial – level, and it invited many to stay, even if only for a year or two, to help maintain stability. Liaquat Ali tried to lure Maurice Zinkin to Pakistan, but the brilliant Civilian from Bombay was too much in demand: he turned down Liaquat Ali, the Colonial Office and the Economist in London in order to work for Unilever in India. Pakistan was more fortunate in its approaches to Alexander MacFarquhar, who served for several years as its commerce and education secretary, to Sidney Ridley, who remained secretary to the government of Sind until 1954, and to Roger Howroyd, who was enticed back from Africa to be a district officer, a revenue commissioner and later chairman of the Lahore Improvement Council. Edward Snelson, who had been called to the Bar before he joined the ICS in 1929, might have stayed in Pakistan indefinitely if he had not fallen out with the country’s judiciary. Between 1951 and 1961 he was secretary to the ministries of law and parliamentary affairs and in that capacity was responsible for drafting much of the legislation needed for the new state; he also led the country’s delegation to international conferences on the law of the sea. In at least one respect Pakistan must have been good for these four men: their average age when they died was ninety.
British Civilians also chose to stay on in East Bengal, which was about to become East Pakistan. When Stephen Hatch-Barnwell passed the ICS exam he was sent to Bengal (although it had been his last choice) and arrived there in 1933, when political terrorism was at its height. One of his duties was to act as a supplementary bodyguard to his district officer (the extremists’ favourite target), walking behind him with his hand in his pocket, clutching a revolver. Yet he grew to love Bengal and wished to stay there after Independence. He could have gone to either side of the partitioned province, but he opted for Pakistan because it had greater need of civil servants and because it would have felt strange working with Congressmen who had spent decades trying to get rid of people like himself.
After he had made his choice, Hatch-Barnwell was transferred to Bakerganj, a delta district that included numerous islands in the Bay of Bengal and which was bound to be included in the new Muslim state. There, on 15 August 1947, this very tall, very thin, very English-looking gentleman lowered the Union Jack and cheerfully hoisted the Pakistani flag before giving an animated speech in Bengali to a crowd celebrating the occasion. Perhaps he felt relieved to be no longer the agent of a colonial power but a senior official of an independent country. As a district officer he began the process by which the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans were eventually protected; he then moved on to become director-general of grain procurement, and he ended up as chairman of the East Pakistan Agricultural Development Corporation, a job he left in 1966 after nineteen years as an employee of the government. He never regretted his decision to stay on, yet from time to time he reflected rather ruefully on the impoverishment it had caused him, especially when he and his wife were living in a ‘most miserable little flat’ in Dacca. As an officer in the ICS in 1940, he had owned a car, a motorboat, two horses and a motor bicycle. Some of these he gave up during the war; the car he had to relinquish later because his salary lagged behind the rise in the cost of living in East Pakistan. By the 1960s, although he was earning as much as any other civil servant in the country, he could afford only a pushbike.70
In 1947 John Christie chose to remain in India not to continue his civil service career but because he and his wife ‘had struck some roots in Delhi’, and he wished to go on working there, first in business and later in industry. The independence of India and Pakistan did of course mean a huge change in the political and military structures of the Subcontinent: most of the British soldiers went back to Britain, and so did many of the administrators. Yet in other spheres not a lot changed, at least not for a decade or more. The year 1947 was not like the end of a great military struggle when the invaders are all expelled and their collaborators are rounded up and punished. Even in so sensitive a field as the judiciary, where ex-colonialists might be regarded warily and suspected of bias, judges carried on their careers and reached the top of their profession. Sir Arthur Harries, once a barrister at the Middle Temple, retired as chief justice of the High Court of Calcutta in 1959. William Broome, formerly an ICS officer and district judge, became chief justice of the High Court at Allahabad and remained there till 1972, after which he retired to Bangalore. He had a Hindu wife and, according to his obituarist, ‘his commitment to India was complete’.71
Most professions were not greatly affected by the changes of regime. Missionaries continued to work in schools and hospitals, and the Oxford Mission and the Cambridge Brotherhood supplied bishops for the various Anglican sees, including the new diocese of Dacca. Both men and women stayed to work in the medical profession. At Independence officers of the IMS were offered the options of retirement or work in Pakistan, but not India, which had enough qualified doctors of its own. E. J. Somerset, professor of ophthalmology at the Calcutta Medical College, considered going to Pakistan but decided against because he ‘rather expected it to fold up in chaos’ and, if it did, ‘bang would go’ his pension. He then thought of returning to Britain, but patients he had amassed in his private practice in Calcutta begged him to remain. So he did and, although he was no longer employed by the college, their fees were able to sustain an agreeable life revolving around his clinic, his house, his clubs and his sport – golf on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons at the Royal Calcutta Club, where bearers were placed near the seventh and fourteenth holes to serve orange and lime juice to dehydrated golfers. The business community of the Bengal capital, both British and Indian, prospered in the 1950s, and several of Somerset’s ex-IMS colleagues were also able to establish large private practices. He himself used to spend a few months in Britain every third year, and in 1961, in his mid-fifties, he decided to retire there. He had always thought the few old ‘dugouts’ who remained indefinitely in India ‘looked rather pathetic’, and he did not wish to become an ‘old codger with no contemporaries’. There were also positive reasons to return to Britain: he needed to spend ten years working for the National Health Service before he could qualify for a pension, and he wanted to educate his daughters in a British school.72
One profession which in some ways became easier and more interesting after Independence was journalism. During the Raj British journalists often found themselves attacked by ‘koi-hais’* for being too liberal and sympathetic to Indians, and by nationalists for being apologists for the empire. Now they could be unbiased commentators and reporters. As editor of the Calcutta Statesman, a paper he had joined in 1937, Ian Stephens felt ‘specially suited to urge upon the two successor-states the necessity for something like mutual friendliness’. He loved both India and Pakistan although after a while he found it impossible to be impartial between them. Considering the Indians to be ‘morally wrong’ and the Pakistanis ‘in the main right’ on the Kashmir issue, he felt obliged to resign and move to Pakistan. He duly became director of the GHQ historical section at Rawalpindi, where he deplored the way that Pakistan’s generals had adopted ‘all too British’ habits such as dropping in for ‘evening whiskies’.73
One of his successors at the Statesman was Evan Charlton, who went to India in the mid-1930s only because he found the ‘journalistic ladder in England … desperately over-crowded’; he had had no family connection or personal interest in India. Yet he soon fell ‘in love with the colours, patterns and smells of the great northern Indian plains’. After serving in the Indian Army during the war, he returned to the Statesman, retiring as its editor in 1967; for him India and journalism had proved to be more interesting than the fate of the British Empire. So were they for C. R. Maundy, another ex-Indian Army officer, who became an editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, a magazine read eagerly by anglicized Indians in the 1950s.
Another job that often seemed easier to perform after Independence was teaching. Leslie Goddard was typical of numerous schoolmasters who took up posts in the Hills in the early 1930s and remained there until they retired in the mid-1960s, in Goddard’s case as rector (headmaster) of St Paul’s School in Darjeeling. For him, as for others, 1947 was not a crucial moment in his career. J. A. K. Martyn was one of several British teachers who in 1935 helped start the Doon School, a public school for Indian boys at Dehra Dun; he became its second headmaster and remained in the post until 1966, when he retired in the town itself. Far from complicating his life, Independence helped it become ‘much pleasanter than before’. Although Indians had never made him ‘feel at all unwelcome’, they now explicitly made him feel ‘very welcome’; and he no longer had to live ‘rather uncomfortably … in two different social worlds’. Moreover, as the school’s prestige grew – and governors and generals came as guests to its Founder’s Days – he could feel proud that his institution was now ‘playing a more important part in the life of the country’.74 Another teacher who believed passionately in the importance of his school was Major Geoffrey Langlands, who taught at Aitchison College at Lahore before setting up his own school at Chitral, high in the Hindu Kush. In 2013, at the age of ninety-five, he finally retired as headmaster, but he was so possessive of Langlands College and so resistant to the reforms of his successor, an Englishwoman, that he resumed control two years later and sealed the coup by persuading the interior ministry (headed by one of his former pupils) to cancel her visa. Only after a protest from the governors and the rest of the staff did he back down and allow her to resume her post as headmistress.75 In October 2017 Queen Elizabeth sent the major congratulations on celebrating his hundredth birthday, ninety-nine years after the death of his father in the flu epidemic at the end of the First World War.
Independence did not provoke a crisis for British firms in India or an exodus of businessmen. There was no rupture. Although in 1946 Congress had threatened to take control of banks and nationalize industries, the party was more conciliatory to capitalism when it came to power. In the old presidency cities businesses flourished in the 1950s, and there were even some new opportunities, especially in Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan. Companies took on young men attracted more to post-colonial India and its low cost of living than to post-war Britain with its rationing and its Labour government. And the perks survived, with the clubs and the golf, the cheap servants and the spacious dwellings. In Bombay you could still go to race meetings or Gilbert and Sullivan concerts at the Gymkhana, though you could no longer drink at the Yacht Club, which lost its liquor licence in 1949 and did not get it back until 1961.76
Surprising though the success of British firms may have been in the 1950s, nobody should have been surprised that it did not continue into the 1960s. In the mid-1950s Congress decided to limit the activities of the managing agencies and to adopt a ‘socialistic pattern’ for its society and its economy. India was after all a poor post-colonial country with a government that believed it should tackle its problems with nationalization, protection, a planned economy and an enormous bureaucracy. The British and their businesses were thus hit by high taxation, work permits for foreigners, a drastic devaluation of the rupee in 1966 and the abolition of the managing agencies in 1969. All forms of British enterprise suffered from the changes. The Kanpur mills passed one by one into Indian hands, and the last of the British owners left India in November 1970. The planters had prospered in the 1950s, but land reforms in the south and government regulations everywhere persuaded them that they had no future. At the High Range Club in Munnar there were still enough planters in 1962 to hold golf tournaments between ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’, but most of them left soon afterwards.77 In 1970 Adam Hare retired after managing tea gardens for thirty-two years in Sylhet in what was still East Pakistan though about to become Bangladesh. Yet retirement did not always mean repatriation. One small burial ground in the Sylhet district contains the graves of Tam Arthur, a planter from Dundee who died in 1976, his mother-in-law, who had died the year before, and his son, who died in 1983.78
According to the British High Commission, the number of British residents in India halved in successive decades, from 28,000 in 1951 to 14,000 ten years later, to some 6,500 in 1971, though these figures presumably include only those who were registered with the High Commission.79 The ‘stayers-on’, those who had been there since before 1947, declined (proportionately) more quickly from the 1970s, a consequence of old age and death, and in the early twenty-first century Hugh Purcell went to India to interview and write about some of the last of them. Almost inevitably he found ‘eccentrics’ and ‘legendary figures’ such as Bob Wright, once described by the Hindustan Times (with some exaggeration) as the ‘most influential figure in Calcutta after Mother Teresa’, a boxwallah who ran charities, represented the British in West Bengal, and saved the Tollygunge Club from collapse.80 His wife Anne made a post-colonial career for herself as a passionate conservationist and a trustee of the Indian branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Moving to Bombay, now known as Mumbai, Purcell went to the Yacht Club to meet Major Frank Courtney, who had come to India with the Royal Fusiliers in 1935, had fought with the 4th Indian Division in the Middle East in the Second World War, and had stayed on to work in radio. Although he had a house in Hampshire and a daughter in Monaco, the major preferred to live in Mumbai because he thought Indians were better carers of old people. Another Bombay resident with a home in England was Lieutenant-Colonel Graham Tullet, who was too young to be a stayer-on but who had been elected president of the Yacht Club in 2004 even though its 1,200 members were now all Indians except for himself, Courtney and one other person. Tullet’s English home was in Somerset, and during the fox-hunting season he would often spend Friday evening drinking at the Dolphin Bar of the Yacht Club, board the KLM flight to Amsterdam which left at one in the morning, then fly from the Netherlands to Bristol and – with the help of the five-and-a-half-hour time difference – get to his house in time for breakfast before riding to hounds a couple of hours later.81
After Independence Paul Scott’s fictional colonel, ‘Tusker’ Smalley, ‘took a commercial job’ with a British firm in Bombay, and fifteen years later he and his wife, Lucy, retired to a hill station. That was a natural pattern for men who were middle-aged in 1947 and who needed a job. Couples at retirement age – and widows at any age – were more likely to head straight for the Hills. Before hill stations, widows who wished to remain in India had lived in the Plains or in the more salubrious climate of Bangalore. Begum Johnson, whom we have already met, lived long and contentedly in old age in Calcutta. So, a generation later, did Mrs Hannah Ellerton, who, like the ‘begum’, outlived her husbands, became a matriarchal figure in society, and died at the age of eighty-five.82
Many women supplemented their widow’s pensions by running boarding houses or renting out rooms in their homes to lodgers or ‘paying guests’. From the middle of the nineteenth century, they usually went to the hill stations, though some retired to Kashmir, where they were unkindly known as ‘the Yaks’ because they wore ‘shaggy fur coats of local manufacture’.83 Some of these ladies were formidable memsahibs and very choosey about their lodgers. One of them, the widow of Major Bateman-Champain, was for a long time the leader of society at the hill station of Lansdowne, where she was accepted as the ‘self-appointed guardian of ancient custom’; nobody contested her right to be escorted into dinner in the local Mess (the 3rd Gurkhas) by the senior officer present. Known as ‘Mrs Fizzer’, Mrs Bateman-Champain let rooms in her bungalow to one or two members of the ‘Fishing Fleet’ and made it her project to marry them off while they were staying with her, often to officers of the regiment. ‘So skilled’ was she that, during the years John Morris was with the Gurkhas, ‘none of these maidens failed to catch her man’.84
Small colonies of stayers-on were established at many of the hill stations, among others Simla, Shillong, Naini Tal, Gulmarg and Darjeeling. Some people liked to retire to Dehra Dun, which had a good climate for gardening, and go up to nearby Mussoorie when the weather became too hot. Yet the most popular retirement stations were in the Nilgiris, where it never snowed. In the early 1920s a group of retired officials and boxwallahs known as the ‘Coonor Octogenarians’ were ‘famous for their skill at Badminton … and their readiness to come down to the plains to meet an emergency or fill a gap’.85 Yet even the claims of Coonor and Kodaikanal were not considered comparable to those of Ooty. Since the middle of the nineteenth century the summer capital of the south had attracted all kinds of pensioners, soldiers, planters, officials and clergymen, as well as widows. One forest officer retired there and was buried at his request in a teak wood he had planted nearby.86 Funerals at Ooty might generally be small village-type ceremonies, but they could be a lot grander. When General Sir James Charlemagne Dormer died there in 1893, his body lay in state at his residence, and as the cortege made its way to the church to be met by the bishop, it was accompanied by gunfire salutes and the band of the Royal Scots playing the ‘Dead March’; behind the coffin walked the general’s favourite horse ‘in full trappings with the boots reversed in the stirrups’ – a custom at military funerals indicating that the deceased will ride no more.87
Ooty used to have a retirement colony of about a hundred families. After Independence some of these went to Britain, decided they had made a mistake and came back again, but many more left or died off over the next twenty years. When Molly Panter-Downes visited the place in 1966, she was told that the town still had ‘about thirty families’, but she soon realized that quite a few of these ‘families’ consisted of a solitary person. There were no young adults and no children except a few from the tea plantations near Coonor who came for tea at the Club on Sundays. Almost nobody ran a business except Mrs Carter, the wife of a retired tea planter, who made farmhouse cheeses from the milk of cattle grazing in the Nilgiri pastures.88
The stayers-on at Ooty may have kept their community alive for a few years after 1947, playing tennis, going to the Club, ‘carrying on as normal’. But it became a sad place soon afterwards, inhabited mainly by the old, the lonely and the bereaved, people with nowhere else to go, men and women struggling on small pensions of diminishing value. Some seemed to survive only by adhering to a completely rigid routine, behaving as if the smallest deviation would make them lose their bearings and perhaps crack up. The only permanent resident in the hotel where Panter-Downes stayed was Miss Kathleen Myers, a former principal of St Mary’s College in Madras who had retired to Ooty, where she was now the ‘honorary secretary’ of the Nilgiri Library, a red-brick Gothic edifice. Miss Myers ran her days according to timetables so regular that her fellow resident soon knew at exactly what time she would fold up her napkin, drive to the library, go for her ‘constitutional’ or set out for the bridge table in her tweed suit. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday she strode into the Club on the dot of half-past five to play bridge with the Club secretary and two other ladies; on Monday and Wednesday she played the same game at the Indian Union Club, and on Fridays she returned there for meetings of the Culture Circle, either to attend a lecture or to listen to gramophone records. Sundays had no unalterable schedule, but Miss Myers often went to the Assembly Rooms cinema to see ‘some American trash’.89 It was a routine designed to combat loneliness.
Khushwant Singh, the distinguished writer and journalist, recalled that he had known three types of English persons in India: those who had disliked the country, the dirt, the climate, the smells and indeed the people; those who had liked it for what it gave them – the sport, the servants, the standard of living – but who ignored the Indians; and those who had ‘liked everything about India, stayed away from the racist clubs, went out of their way to befriend Indians and maintained contacts with them after returning to England’; some of these had also supported ‘the freedom movement and stayed on in India after the country gained independence’. This last group may have been the smallest, but it was not negligible: Khushwant Singh admitted he was ‘fortunate in knowing quite a few of this breed’.90
We have found numerous examples of people who decided in the course of their Indian careers that they did not want to return to Britain when they retired: India was now their home. A smaller number of men only realized that India should be their home after they had gone back to England. One of these was T. R. Bell, who went to India in the 1880s to work in the forests of the Bombay presidency, where he became chief conservator and pursued his passion for lepidoptery. In retirement he gave his butterfly collection to the Natural History Museum in London and worked there himself, an ideal pensioner’s job, one might have thought. In fact Bell could not stand London or England, and he fled back to Karwar, a paradise for lepidopterists, and died there in 1948.91 A few years younger than Bell, Loftus Tottenham was a Civilian who had spent his career working in the south. According to Humphrey Trevelyan, he was very partial to Malayali women and was ‘reputed to have progeny all down the west coast’.92 Whatever the truth of the report, he was an able and sympathetic civil servant. It was ‘torture’, observed Trevelyan, for him to retire to Devon, where his sisters had prepared him a home at Paignton which they renamed Lofthouse. So he returned to India to become diwan or chief minister of the princely state of Pudukottai, where he died in 1946, leaving money for the poor of the place to feast every year on the anniversary of his death. However, according to his godson, Sir Stephen Egerton, the funds were diverted to the family of the executor and were soon exhausted.93
Khushwant Singh’s third category had its origins more than a century before he was born, with men such as ‘Hindoo Stuart’ and William Gardner. The species may have become endangered soon after them, but it survived, revived and expanded between the world wars. And after 1947 there was no need for it to be threatened ever again. Rid of the encumbrance of empire, Britons could enjoy and appreciate India without having to apologize for being there. John Grigg, the journalist who renounced his father’s title (Baron Altrincham), could become a friend of leading Congress politicians in a way that would have been impossible for his grandfather Harry (an ICS officer who was Resident of Travancore and Cochin) or his father, Edward, a politician who was offered the governorship of Bengal. And there was reciprocal relief on India’s side: even its post-colonial historians, however critical of the Raj, were seldom Anglophobes at a personal level. Friendships and love affairs now could – and did – happen naturally, on a basis of equality, with rapidly diminishing disapproval on both sides. Freer from prejudice, sensibilities opened up and flourished. The Australian journalist Philip Knightley went to India in 1960, married an Indian woman and decided that ‘everything in India tastes, smells and feels better because with the Indian way of life the senses are more alive’.94
* * *
No one, no group, no age can be representative of the British presence in India, initiated in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth and culminating, at any rate officially, just before the reign of the second. This book has anyway been mainly about individuals, and India was a good place for individualism. It was also a good place for eccentrics, so my book ends with one who was very British, very pro-Indian and strongly opposed to the Raj.
J. B. S. Haldane, an Old Etonian Marxist and scientist, was twice wounded in the First World War before he went to India to convalesce. He loved the country, where he ate street food and drank unboiled water, but he decided not to return there until he ‘could associate with Indians on a footing of equality’. Thirty-five years later, by now a very famous and versatile biologist, he went back, and in 1957 he and his wife, Helen Spurway (also a biologist), decided to move to India to work at an institute in Calcutta. He was soon learning Sanskrit, wearing Indian clothes, becoming a vegetarian, promoting ‘non-violent biological studies’ (i.e. without killing animals in experiments) and wishing that ‘Gandhism [was] actively preached and practised in Britain’.
Haldane gave several explanations for his move to India, political, scientific and personal. On the political front he thought India was ‘doing as much for world peace’ as anyone else, and he found Jawaharlal Nehru a more sympathetic politician than any British leader. On the scientific side he felt that, while the West had become obsessed with technique and technology, India’s diversity of fauna and flora offered new opportunities for field work and a more human and humane biology. As for the personal, that was the easiest to explain. He had worked for three decades at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, and now he needed a more congenial climate to retire to and relax in. Above all he wanted to wear fewer clothes: to have spent ‘sixty years in socks was enough’.* 95