Untold lives blog

RHS National Gardening Week seems a good time to highlight the work of East India Company botanists such as John Forbes Royle who from 1823 was Superintendent of Saharanpur Botanic Garden, located about 1,000 miles west of Calcutta. He was part of a network of people collecting and describing plants, managing botanic gardens and experimenting with plant transfers, often in difficult conditions. Their work led to changes to agricultural production in India and the introduction of new plants to British gardens.

Royle's article in the Journal of the Asiatic Society (1832) tells us that as well as appreciating the aesthetic qualities of plants, he valued botany for its usefulness to medicine and for developing new sources of food and economic products. He believed that the practical benefits of botany could only be realised if underpinned by a sound knowledge of the distinguishing characteristics of plants and an understanding of their geographical distribution and the implications of that for their requirements for healthy growth. He took advantage of Saharunpur's elevated position to experiment with growing plants that could not cope with the hotter conditions at the parent institution in Calcutta.

Royle lacked time to do much plant-hunting himself so he used his gardeners and his contacts with shawl merchants to acquire new specimens, using the knowledge he gained to compile his Illustrations of the Botany and other Branches of Natural History of the Himalayan Mountains and the Flora of Cashmere. The herbarium he developed was sent to Britain and I believe it is now in the care of Liverpool Museums.

Royle spent much of his own money on acquiring books to support his studies and rebuilding his home, which also housed his herbarium, as "the Garden Bungalow from being thatched and built of mud, swarmed with white ants and reptiles of every description". The East India Company provided him with a modest salary and practical support, but declined to cover these additional expenses, despite Nathaniel Wallich, Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, putting in a heartfelt plea on Royle's behalf. Despite his disappointment about the lack of financial support, Royle seems to have continued his botanical career with undiminished enthusiasm.

Penny Brook
Lead Curator, India Office Records

Images are from Illustrations of the Botany and other Branches of Natural History of the Himalayan Mountains and the Flora of Cashmere Vol II

India Office Records sources relating to botany are listed in R Axelby and P Nair Science and the changing environment in India 1780-1920: a guide to sources in the India Office Records

Images of selected collection items relating to Nathaniel Wallich and the Calcutta Botanic Garden are available online

Catalogues of the India Office Records, which include the archives of the East India Company are in SOCAM

Explore the British Library to discover the British Library's printed collections

The professional dancers of the 18th-century London stage, like all but a few of the actors and actresses of the period, have almost entirely disappeared from view. Among those now emerging from undeserved obscurity is Hester Santlow Booth, who was both a leading dancer and a leading actress at Drury Lane between 1706 and 1733. Her acting roles, which may be traced through newspaper advertisements and printed playtexts surviving in the British Library’s collections, ranged from the title role in Charles Shadwell’s The Fair Quaker of Deal (which owed its initial success to her performance) to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (a part she played for much of her career).

Dancing is the most ephemeral of the performing arts, yet some of Hester Booth’s dances can successfully be reconstructed because they were recorded in one of the earliest forms of dance notation. Many of these notated dances can also be found in the Library. One of the rarest such works, A New Collection of Dances by the choreographer Anthony L’Abbé published in the mid-1720s, includes four of her dances. Among them, the solo Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis is remarkable for its length and its virtuosity. In performance, it brings fully to life the description of Mrs Booth’s dancing to be found in a poem by her husband, the much-admired actor and Drury Lane Theatre manager Barton Booth, published shortly after his death. Booth compared her to Venus, Daphne and Diana, writing of her ‘Sweetness with Majesty combin’d’ and her ‘Harmonious Gesture’ and exclaiming at how ‘She whirls around! she bounds! she springs!’. Such was his wife’s power in performance, that Booth was moved to ask ‘Can Eloquence herself do more?’. Dance, it seems, left drama behind when it came to a truly great dancer.

Moira Goff
Curator, Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800

Further Reading:
Booth, Barton. ‘Ode. On Mira, Dancing’, in Victor, Benjamin. Memoirs of the Life of Barton Booth, Esq; (London: John Watts, 1733), pp. 49-51

L’Abbé, Anthony. ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis performd by Mrs Santlow’, in A New Collection of Dances ([London]:  Mr Barreau and Mr Roussau, [1725?]), plates 46-56

Achieving second place out of 104 candidates in the Civil Service examination of 1906, John Maynard Keynes took up the position of junior clerk in the Military Department of the India Office in October of that year.

The first task that faced him was to find bulls for the military’s dairy farms in Bombay. To breed high-quality milking cows, the army had decided to import British bulls and to cross them with Indian cows. Documents in the India Office Records, many in Keynes’s hand, describe the undertaking. With the help of John Speir, a cattle expert from Glasgow, ten young Ayrshire bulls were chosen and purchased. A pedigree was supplied with each bull (‘Mr Lindsay’s bull, Sire Prince Galla. Dam Beauty, in 1906 she yielded 807 gallons of milk of 4.3% fat’); costs and conditions of transport were negotiated with shipping agents, and a suitable escort was sought for the voyage. Speir’s nephew agreed to accompany the animals, and the SS ‘Costello’ set sail from Hull in January 1907. The cargo was delivered safely, sustaining no greater damage than a single calf with a sore foot.

Long after Keynes had left the India Office, the results of his work became clear. In 1912, Army HQ reported that ‘the half-bred progeny of Scottish bulls are greatly superior in every way to those of the Australian bulls’.

Keynes’s India Office career was brief. In 1908 he resigned to take up a fellowship at Cambridge. His strong interest in Indian monetary policy quickly made his reputation. After publishing Indian Currency and Finance in 1913, he was invited, aged only 29, to sit on the Royal Commission set up to investigate the Indian currency system (the Chamberlain Commission).

  IOR/L/MIL/7/1384

This document is Keynes’s draft of a letter to Speir. The annotations show the elaborate conduct of business for which the India Office was known. The draft was submitted upwards to the Secretary of State, John Morley, who passed it down to the Military Committee of the Council of India.* After Committee’s approval, the draft was reviewed and signed off by Council. A fair copy was despatched in the name of the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India, John Ellis. The original was returned to Keynes to file away.

Antonia Moon 
Senior Archivist, India Office Records

Further reading:

D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: an economist’s biography (London: Routledge, 1992)

Find out more about the India Office Records.