Untold lives blog

In 1810 Sir John Malcolm undertook a diplomatic mission to Persia with the aim of consolidating Britain’s position in the region.  A letter from the Civil Auditor’s Office at Fort William in Bengal to William Bruce, Resident at Bushire, includes a list of presents given to the Persian Shah by Malcolm on his departure.  Malcolm thanked his host for the favour shown to him with a variety of gifts: cattle, pistols, a telescope, a ‘Copernican System of Astronomy’, swords, as well as luxury goods including opera glasses, various cloths in satin and muslin, shawls, and diamonds.

Sir John Malcolm - Lithograph by R.J. Lane (1832)       Images Online 

   
The ‘List of Diamond Jewelry’ still looks enchanting after 200 years.  Diamonds feature in rings with pearls, enamel, emeralds and in other objects, like a ‘Rose Diamond Girdle clap’ [sic] worth 638 Rupees.  But the best piece of the collection is the last on the list, a ‘diamond valued 11.000 Rupees’.

IOR/R/15/1/15, f 90r  

IOR/R/15/1/15, f 90v 

What would be the price of this diamond nowadays?  According to the same list of presents, a gold watch was worth 1 Rupee, and a pair of spectacles 5 Rupees.  Assuming that the exchange rate at that time was 8 Rupees for £1 Sterling, this source suggests that nowadays the approximate values would be £170 for the gold watch, £533 for the spectacles, and an enormous £1.2 million for the diamond.

Fat′h Ali Shah was certainly a great connoisseur and collector of gems and Sir John Malcolm must have been aware of this when he brought expensive gifts for him and his ministers.  He commented that this ‘extravagance of the public money’ would cause him problems with the East India Company.

However even this lavishness was not enough to please the Persian Court.  Malcolm’s diary records: ‘I made the Prince a present of about 14.000 rupees, of which a diamond valued between 10.000 and 11.000 made part.  The royal jeweller, angry at not being consulted, undervalued the stone, swearing, I understand, it was not worth more than two or three thousand’.  Malcolm had to withdraw the gift and donate the money he received from selling it, and concluded that the Prince was as ‘rapacious as his brethren, and as insensible to shame’.

According to his later memoirs Sketches of Persia, Sir John Malcolm was given the privilege of inspecting the Shah‘s richest jewels ‘amongst which was the "Sea of Light," which is deemed one of the purest and most valuable diamonds in the world.  Many of the others are surprisingly splendid.  The "Darya-i-Nur" or "Sea of Light" weighs 186 carats, and is considered to be the diamond of the finest lustre in the world.  The "Taj-e-Mah" or "Crown of the Moon", is also a splendid diamond.  It weighs 146 carats.  These two are the principal diamonds in a pair of bracelets, valued at nearly a million sterling. Those in the crown are also of extraordinary size and value’.

We just don’t know what happened to the diamonds; but, as I write, other correspondence volumes from the British Residency at Bushire in the period are being catalogued and digitised, so there is a possibility that new discoveries will be made.

The main issue encountered in writing this piece is to understand the historical value of goods.  Please let us have your comments and thoughts on the subject.

Valentina Mirabella
Archival Specialist, British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership 

Qatar Digital Library

Tweet @miravale

Further reading:
IOR/R/15/1/15, ff. 90-91, letter from J. W. Sherer, Civil Auditor at Fort William, to William Bruce, Acting Resident at Bushire, 13 June 1812.
John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia : from the journals of a traveller in the East (London: Murray, 1827)
Historical exchange rates

13th century Arabic manuscripts in the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library, East Jerusalem; rock inscriptions in the Tadrart Acacus mountains in Libya; records of the sale of slaves on the island of St Vincent in the West Indies; photos of Andean culture from Peru; Buddhist manuscripts from Bhutan – all of these and more have been preserved through funding from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.

EAP298/14/4/34 Saqras dancers of the Diablada Dance. Torres Belon Stadium, Puno, Peru 
 

The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), sponsored by the charitable foundation Arcadia, was set up in 2004 and will be celebrating its 10th anniversary next year. During this time 214 projects have been funded in countries around the world: from Azerbaijan and Argentina, to Vietnam and Zambia, vulnerable archival material has been preserved. This is achieved through the relocation of the documents to a safe local archival home where possible, digitising the material, and depositing copies with local archival partners and with the British Library. These digital collections are then available for researchers to access freely, either by visiting the local archives, visiting the British Library, or viewing them online through the EAP website. To date, the digital collections from 35 projects are available online.

 
EAP310/4/2/23 – Tshamdrak Temple - Thor bu sTon pa'i skyes rabs 

One of the more popular items that has been viewed online is the Banns of Marriage (1849-1924) from the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. The island’s archives in Jamestown hold records from its first years as an English colony, with the earliest documents dating from 1673 and including East India Company records through to 1834. After 1834 and the transition to direct Crown rule, the records follow the standard pattern of similar colonies. The Banns of Marriage are remarkable in allowing an insight into people’s lives at this time and are of great interest to people researching their family history.

EAP524/2/3/1 Banns of Marriage (1849-1924)  

EAP524 St Helena Ordinances

Do you know of any collections that merit preservation? The Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting grant applications for the next annual funding round – the deadline for submission of preliminary applications is 1 November 2013 and full details of the application procedures and documentation are available on the EAP website.

Cathy Collins
EAP Grants Administrator 

Further reading:

More about EAP

13th century Arabic manuscripts in Al-Aqsa Mosque Library
Rock inscriptions in the Tadrart Acacus mountains
Sale of slaves on St Vincent
Photos of Andean culture, Peru
Buddhist manuscripts from Bhutan

This rather unappealing trio of topics are central themes in the published works of Patrick Russell, who spent most of the 1780s in southern India under the auspices of the East India Company.

Patrick Russell from An Account of Indian serpents (X360) 

Born in Edinburgh in 1727, he studied medicine at King’s College in Aberdeen before following one of his brothers to Aleppo in Syria, becoming physician at the factory of the English Levant Company in 1753. Undaunted by epidemics of plague which ravaged the city during the early 1760s, he stayed in the Middle East for more than twenty years before returning to Britain, settling in London and gaining election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1777.

It seems, however, that the lure of the East proved too strong and in 1781, in the footsteps of another brother, he travelled out to India. In November 1785 he was appointed Surgeon in the Madras Army. This position allowed him to indulge his wide interests in natural history (as, in fact, his predecessor had done, the Dane Johan Gerhard Koenig), and shortly before his return to London in January 1789 he left the collection of zoological and botanical specimens he had amassed with the Company’s museum.

Between then and his death in 1805 he wrote, edited and published a number of works on scientific subjects. Utilizing his experiences and memories of Aleppo, in 1791 he brought out a two-volume A Treatise of the Plague (reference W 2799). Four years later he wrote the preface to the first volume of William Roxburgh’s Plants of the coast of Coromandel (i.e. south east India – X 606). In 1796 he published the first of what were to be four volumes entitled An Account of Indian serpents collected on the coast of Coromandel  (X 360) – one of the earliest works in Europe about Indian snakes - and this was followed in 1803 by another two-volume opus, his Description and figures of two hundred fishes collected at Vizagapatam (X 1000). Collaborators ensured that his work on snakes was completed in 1809.  

These works contain many fascinating illustrations, a small selection of which are reproduced here.

 
"Coluber Naja" 
  

"Nooree Nalaka" 

"Ourdia" 

"Bondaroo Kappa" 

Hedley Sutton
Asian & African Studies Reference Team Leader  

When we first created this blog, we hoped that it would inspire new research and encourage researchers to tell us about their discoveries in our collections. The Library recently filmed a range of different people who have taken inspiration from the collections, to create a series called Made with the British Library. Here’s one of our favourite stories: the rediscovery of a lost city.

Dr Diana Newall is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Kent. She is an art historian, focusing on 15th century travel and Mediterranean studies. Diana began using the British Library during her PhD, when she was researching the Venetian period on Crete (in the 13th – 17th centuries), and the Cretan school of art created during that time. She became interested in Candia: the former capital of Crete, on the site of modern Heraklion. Candia was destroyed in the early 20th century and there is very little evidence of the old city. Diana used our collections to try to recreate this lost city. Watch the video to find out what she discovered.

  

We’d love to hear about how the Library has inspired you, or about your discoveries in our collections. Write a comment below, or send us an email [email protected].

Melissa Byrd, Higher Education team 

In January 1864, a large Agricultural Exhibition was held at Calcutta sponsored by the Government of Bengal. A relatively novel event, the aims of the Central Organising Committee were to bring together for comparison and competition from every part of India specimens of local productions.

When the Exhibition opened the contributions on show were arranged into three classes: ive stock, machinery and implements,and produce. Some of the contributors did suffer from confusion as to what was required for exhibition, with some believing that anything strange or unusual was what was wanted. The Central Committee noted in its report of the sheep submitted to them that “Hairy creatures with enormous horns were of frequent occurrence. One ram was said to have maintained a combat with a tiger”, and in another instance a woman brought a small black kid of the ordinary Bengali breed, born with three legs instead of four! Despite such minor problems the exhibition was considered to have been a great success, with an estimated 70,000 people visiting it.

The success of the Exhibition led quickly to local agricultural exhibitions being held throughout Bengal and Bihar Orissa in 1864/65. Copies of the reports on the various exhibitions submitted to Central Government by local officials can be found in the India Office Records. The reports give a wealth of detail about the organisation of the exhibitions, and the people who took part, with the mix of European and Native Indian participants being reflected in the prize lists of the various competitions.

Image of prize bull c.1865 from IOR/L/E/3/748 

Livestock was often the star of the agricultural shows. The judges at Dacca reported that the standard of bulls and cows was very good, with Khajeh Abdool Gunny taking a first prize for his half-English, half-country cow, and a Mr Thomas taking first prize of 50 rupees for best bull in the Division. The Dacca Exhibition gave prizes for a wide range of manufactures, including to Gobind Chunder Dutt for “a kind of violin”, and to S A Stewart for his revolving photographic camera. Ameeroollah of Sylhet was awarded a prize of 20 rupees for a case of insects he had collected, it being judged that every encouragement should be given to the study of natural history. Special prizes were also awarded at the Dacca Exhibition. The inventive Gobind Chunder Dutt was awarded a prize of 16 rupees for a specimen of new fibre, while Syud Abdool Mujeed was awarded a prize of 4 rupees for scented tobacco. Institutions as well as individual could exhibit goods. The Dacca Girls School won 2nd prize for woollen articles, with the Dacca Jail taking prizes for fibrous manufacture and paper. Other Shows awarded prizes for flowers and vegetables. At the Burdwan Show, the Maharajah of Burdwan won first prize for geraniums and second prize for roses. For vegetables, Hurro Mohun Mookerjee of Hooghly won 30 rupees as first prize for white sugarcane, while Mrs Atkinson of Burdwan won a first prize of 15 rupees for chillies, and Sharoda Prosad Roy won 5 rupees for cabbages.

John O’Brien
Post 1858 India Office Records

Sources:
Report of the Central Committee on the results of the Bengal Agricultural Exhibition of 1864 [IOR/L/PJ/3/1092 No.81]

Reports and correspondence regarding the Agricultural Exhibitions held in Bengal, December 1864 - February 1865 [IOR/L/PJ/3/1095 No.11]

How was such a peculiar, irritating and unconventional character as Master Bookbinder Billy Noon (1772-1820) ever admitted into the august Worshipful Company of Stationers?  Noon supervised 5 apprentices from 1806-13 at his workshop at 30 Warwick Lane in London and participated in several trade societies but was more renowned for his practical jokes than his bindings.

Warwick Lane, the scene of many of Billy Noon's escapades from Ernest George, Etchings of Old London (1884) Images Online 

Noon knocked off the chimney pot of a local pub to win a bet. He climbed on to his own roof and sounded off a police rattle.  Once a crowd had gathered below, Noon emptied a slop pail over them.  This led to a fine, but such punishment was no deterrent.  Noon jumped onto passing wagons full of hay, played an organ in the middle of the night and threw offal at the waistcoat of a passing gentleman.  Living near Smithfield meat market, there was a lot of offal about, and also livestock.  Noon enjoyed annoying the animals by firing peas at them. Once a bull nearly got the better of Noon by cornering him in an alley but “he, by some dexterous movement which was neither perceived by the eyes of the bull nor by the bystanders, got through betwixt its legs and mounted its back in triumph”.

Fellow Stationers were a favourite target. At official dinners, Noon would pull faces at the diners at the top table, making them laugh so much that they couldn’t eat. A contemporary description relates that Noon was “a smartish chap, his activity was very great and his grimaces were most laughable - he could put his legs up behind his shoulders – and the great [comic actor] Chas Mathews did not surpass him for ludicrous changes of physiognomy and laughable attitudes”.

Actor, Charles Mathews  who was famous for his comic poses. From Anne Mathews, Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian (1838) British Library 840.e.7,8.

It is no wonder that “the Stationers’ Company offered [Noon] over and over again large premiums to withdraw … but with no success”.

Philippa Marks
Curator, Bookbindings; Printed Historical Sources   

Further reading;

Ellic Howe and John Child, The Society of London Bookbinders 1780-1951, London, 1952.

John Jaffray Bookbinder. A collection of manuscripts relating to the art and trade of bookbinding. Mic.A.19964.

Despite knitwear being cheap thanks to computerised weaving and cheap overseas labour, the knitter’s art is reviving.  I recently started inventorying the British Library’s collections of vintage knitting guides and the 1930s seemed a good period to start.

Photo by Luca Sage taken at a knitting event at the British Library Spring Festival 2012   

Stitchcraft, the monthly fashion knits magazine, was bought out by Patons & Baldwins in 1932 and continued for another fifty years.   Two collections of P&B’s patterns, issued under the Stitchcraft banner in 1937 and 1939 and 1948-1953, give a good sampling of vintage designs. The firm produced a wide range of patterns, mainly directed to middle class women who had the leisure time for knitting unusual wear.
 
From crêpe and Angora collars to raglan, ruffled, or flared sleeves, there were a lot of ideas back then that, deservedly or not, have been ignored since.  Unlike today, patterns are offered for “the larger figure” and “the older woman”, with stitch-styles such as Fair Isle, arrowhead, fir-cone, bobbles, zig-zags, pin-checked, mock cable, ladder-stitch, moss-stitch, pinwheel, and beehive.
 
Cardigans, jumpers, hats and gloves, twin-sets - you’d expect those.  But a knitted ‘shower-proof golf coat’?   The adventuresome and skilled could make a floor-length luxury dressing gown with silk lining and with any luck they wouldn’t have dribbled cigarette ashes on it.  Some things may have seemed lovely ideas but would the maintenance of knitted panties and cami-knickers really be worth the effort of constructing them in the first place? 
 
Throughout there are suggested colours for a certain style and the occasional rejoinder that “Black and White is Chic!”  Fashionable yarns included Kelpie, Halcyon, Catkin, Diana, Dunora, Beryl, Honeycomb, Totem, Patona, Bouclé, Kingfisher, Bouclet, Mororavia, Netta, Veronica, and even Super Cherub Baby Wool.
 
Mills that supplied yarns tended to merge through the years, and so, the union of Lister with Lee Target, later known as Lister-Lee, resulted in numerous published patterns. From the mid-1960s they offered a series of Mary Quant designs, another with the ‘Op-Art Look’ in black-and-white, faux-military sweaters for children, a  ‘Party Girl’ series, knitted NASA space suits for techno kids of 1969, funky ‘hot pants’ in 1971, and designs for the Royal Wedding of 1981.
 
The Lister folks in Bradford shrewdly got celebrities to pose for their colourful front covers.  These included jazz singer Ottilie Patterson and her then-husband and bandleader Chris Barber modelling knitted, collarless ‘Trad Jackets’ in 1963, perhaps taking their cue from the Beatles’ brief embracing of that style.   Other posing personalities were TV star Amanda Barrie, British Middleweight Champion Johnny Pritchet, recording artists Russ Conway, The Caravelles, and The Viscounts, and Barbara Windsor and Jack Douglas in a series of ‘Carry-On-Knitting’ booklets.
 
Their 1970s and 1980s patterns reflect pop cultures of hippie, disco, and new romantic aesthetics, although they had the good sense not to try to tempt punk-rockers to take up no. 8 needles.   
 
Andy Simons, Printed Historical Sources 

 
Further reading:
Stitchcraft patterns - reference W.P.12165 (1937 and 1939) and reference W.P.14708 (1948-1953)
Lister-Lee patterns - reference 7951.h.2 (1963-1985)

Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop has just won a prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. Curator Andy Simons tells us of other strange book titles lurking in the British Library collections.

There has long been a quasi-sport, in the manner of train spotting, to note down an absurd printed title.  As one who’s charged with filling in the Library’s gaps in its modern UK holdings, I have the privilege of being introduced to many.
 
While Cats in the Belfry sold through several editions since 1957, most oddly-titled works about four-legged friends end up on almost no one’s shelf.  Sacha Carnegie: Pigs I Have Known (1958) and Badgers without Bias : An Objective Look at the Controversy about Tuberculosis in Badgers and Cattle (1981) hopefully each found their keen crowds. 
 
While we appreciate a witty front cover, such as Alexander Payne & James Zemaitis’ The Coffee Table Coffee Table Book (2003), the best ones trip out the front door with laces untied.  Hence, the Association of Maternity & Child Welfare Centres’ Dangerous Dirty Deadly Dummy (c.1929) and VE Louis’ A Motorist’s Guide to the Soviet Union (1967). 
 
Book titles can also be the focus of literary hoaxes. After inviting radio listeners to suggest the theme, plot, title and author of a book that didn’t already exist, Manhattan’s WOR-AM radio presenter Jean Shepherd became amused when his listeners took delight in badgering bookshops to stock it.  Thus, Mr Shepherd co-wrote the non-existent Frederick R. Ewing’s I, Libertine (1957).  This is the gentle sort of hoax that enriches publishing history.
 
But I must shamefully admit that, due to an incautious moment, I incurred a wound on the battlefield of librarianship, a minor scratch really, having fallen hard on a fictitious war casualty.

Lt William Thomas Forshaw VC hurled hand grenades at the enemy for forty one hours August 1915 during an action at Gallipoli. © UIG/The British Library Board  Images Online

While Hoovering-up deserving digitisation candidates for a scanning project about the Great War, Lewis Omer’s Hand Grenade Throwing as a College Sport stumbled into my path and I felt duty-bound to rescue it for posterity.  According to the British Library's catalogue, this would-be Title of the Decade Winner was published in both New York and Chicago by Spalding & Bros, an actual manufacturer of Stateside sporting equipment.  Further, it was just nine printed pages, published in 1918, and destroyed during aerial bombing in the Second World War.
 
Although the smoke was but a wisp, my inner voice should have yelled “Fire!” The Library of Congress haven’t got the booklet and, trust me, it shows up in no other repository.  A certain Mr Lewis Omer wrote a mathematical thesis for his University of Illinois degree in 1902.  And in 1940, one Lewis S. Omer (b. 1873) wrote what appears to be his life story as General Freight Traffic Manager on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. But it’s likely that neither of these are the same Lewis Omer.
 
Frances Wood, curator of Chinese materials at the British Library, wrote Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking : My Part in the Cultural Revolution (2000, 2011), but although her amusing account does reference the proper tossing of explosives, the book’s title is as real as it is amusing.  Despite having a catalogue entry, the arm-wielding of ordnance won’t be part of a degree qualification or be an Olympics event any time soon.
 
Andy Simons, Printed Historical Sources