Untold lives blog

The India Office Records contains many interesting files on the subject of Indian seamen, or lascars, during the First World War.  One example is a file on the lascar crews of German ships interned at various Neutral, Allied and British Ports.  The file contains correspondence, memoranda and statements concerning Indian seamen who had been serving on German ships prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, and had either been stranded at whatever port their ship was interned or had managed to return to India but with a loss of wages.  The file includes statements often listing the names of the seamen, the port of discharge, the name of the ship, and the amount of any wages owed.

IOR/L/E/7/858 File 76

Among the papers in the file is a petition from the Indian crew of the German ship Rauenfels describing their case.  The Rauenfels was a steamship of the Hansa Line Steamer Company of Germany, which embarked from the port of Calcutta on 5 January 1914 with a crew of 40 contracted for a one-year voyage to various ports in Asia and Europe, including Hamburg, Antwerp, Karachi, Bombay, and also New York.  With the outbreak of war in August 1914, the ship took shelter in Bahia in Brazil.  The Indian seamen were kept aboard ship for 5 months in order to complete their agreed term of employment, after which they were forced to go ashore, and left under the care of the British Consul there.  They stayed at Bahia for a month, and were supplied by the Consul with food and lodgings, before being sent back to Calcutta via Marseilles and Rangoon.  The British Consul in Brazil had told the seamen that they would receive the pay still due to them when they reached Calcutta, but six weeks after returning to India, they had still not received it.  They therefore sent a petition to the Bengal Chamber of Commerce in Calcutta, which forwarded it to the Government of India for consideration.  The decision reached by Government was that Local Indian Governments could make such payments to seamen, and then if possible recover the amount plus any repatriation costs from the ships owners or agents.

IOR/L/E/7/858 File 76

With the petition was sent a fascinating list of the 40 crew members giving their names, father’s name, address in India, their capacity (or role) on the ship, term of service, rate of pay, the payment received, and the balance due.  Some of the extraordinary sounding names of the roles listed are intriguing, for instance Donkeyman.  This was someone who was in charge of a steam engine, known as a donkey-engine, which was usually used for subsidiary operations on board ship.

As for the ship, it was seized by the Brazilian Government in 1917 and renamed the Lages.  In September 1942, it was part of convoy of merchant ships which were attacked by a German U-boat off the coast of Brazil.  The Lages was struck by a torpedo and sank with the loss of three lives.

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further reading:
Lascar Crews of German Ships interned at various Neutral, Allied and British Ports, 1915-1917 [Reference IOR/L/E/7/858 File 76]
Tyne Built Ships, A history of Tyne shipbuilders and the ships that they built
Lages

The India Office Records recently acquired a fascinating collection of transcripts of interviews with Indian veterans of the First and Second World Wars.  The interviews were carried out by the American historian DeWitt Ellinwood (1923-2012) and his team of researchers between 1969 and 1986 as part of a historical survey of Indian soldiers, both officers and sepoys, who served in the Indian Army during some part of the period 1914-1939.

Mss Eur F729

The contribution of people from South Asia to the First and Second World Wars was crucial to Britain’s war effort.  India raised the world’s largest volunteer armies for both conflicts.  For each phase of the interviewing project, questionnaires were used as a way of drawing out the veterans’ memories and opinions.  There were questions about background (where the veteran came from, his home village and family), joining the army, training, army career (regiments served with, battles experienced), experiences of British officers, service conditions (food, medical facilities, recreation, and ability to carry out religious duties), contacts with other people (British soldiers, other Indian soldiers of different castes or religions, people of other countries), personal views (did the army change their views or ideas, their political views, their views of the British), and life after leaving the army.

Mss Eur F729

The transcripts of the answers given by the veterans give a fascinating glimpse into a period of their lives which saw great turmoil and change across the world, and an insight into what they felt and thought of that period.  The issue of British rule and the struggle for independence loomed large.  For many the experience of army life and the opportunities to meet people from other parts of the world, strengthened their belief that India should be free from British rule.  For others, the lower pay of Indian soldiers and the lack of respect from British officers led them to support the Independence movement.  Looking back, many of the men interviewed saw their army career as being a positive experience, giving them confidence in their abilities and a sense of purpose to their life.

British and Indian officers, 15th Sikhs, standing in a French farmyard 24 July 1915 Images Online

The catalogue for the collection can be found online in Explore Archives and Manuscripts .

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further reading:
Transcripts of interviews with former Indian soldiers who served in World War One and World War Two, 1967-1986 [Reference Mss Eur F729].

Harriet Sherwood writing for The Guardian, “Indians in the trenches: voices of forgotten army are finally to be heard”, 27 October 2018.

George Morton-Jack, The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory, The Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War (London: Little, Brown, 2018).

In 1917, a new Muslim burial ground opened in Woking for Indian soldiers dying in England during the First World War.

Plan for layout of Woking Burial Ground IOR/L/SUR/5/8/8

In 2016 we posted a piece about the design of the Muslim Burial Ground with images taken from a military file in the India Office Records.  Today’s post develops the story using evidence from papers in the archive of the Surveyor’s Department.

The file is dedicated to the construction of the cemetery, including correspondence between designers and suppliers, plans of the layout of the cemetery, advertisements for grave and coffin prices, financial statements and the names of seventeen Indian soldiers who were buried at the cemetery.

Indian soldiers buried at Woking IOR/L/SUR/5/8/8

Not much is said about the soldiers, just their regimental number, rank, name, regiment and the date of their death. All seventeen of the soldiers died between 1915 and 1916 and the majority of them were either a Sowar (Indian Cavalry) or Sepoy (Indian Infantry). There were also two drivers and two cooks included in the list.

Unfortunately, the information on the soldiers stops there, with no indication on how they died or where they were before being laid to rest at Woking. The plans show that each soldier was to be buried with his ‘face towards Mecca’ and ‘each stone bears an inscription at the top in Hindustani, and then follows the other details in English’. This indicates that the designers made sure that each soldier was buried according to his religion.

The site designer, T.H. Winny, took great care in the preparations and construction of the cemetery, having it built in the Indo-Saracenic architectural style. Throughout the file, there is correspondence between designer and builders going into precise detail including the ‘recipe’ of concrete to be used (‘one part of Portland Cement to 2 parts of clean washed river or grit sand and 5 parts of screened river ballast’), a building contract (‘the whole of the materials and workmanship are to be the best of their respective kinds’) and even how many cypresses to plant in the grounds (‘100, in 4 varieties, 2-5 feet high’).

A newspaper clipping gives insight into what the cemetery was like upon opening, stating that in the sunlight it ‘assumes quite an Oriental appearance’ and the representative for the newspaper was ‘struck with its beauty and the splendour of some of the stones erected on the graves’.

Design for gravestones for Indian soldiers IOR/L/SUR/5/8/8

Winny and his team of designers, builders and suppliers did everything they could to make this corner of Woking into a little piece of India.

Candace Martin-Burgers
Librarianship Placement Student, RMIT, Melbourne

Further reading:
IOR/L/SUR/5/8/8 India Office Surveyor’s Department file on the Muslim Burial Ground at Woking

On 24 January 1901 Emily Hobhouse arrived in Bloemfontein, South Africa, bringing with her a large consignment of supplies for the women and children of the refugee camp there.  The inhabitants of the camp were fleeing the fighting and destruction caused by the Second Anglo-Boer War.  The Bloemfontein camp was home to thousands of displaced Boer civilians who were confined in the camp in temporary shelter without the facilities needed to sustain such large numbers.  The appalling conditions that Hobhouse witnessed would motivate her to challenge the British authorities at the highest level.

Hobhouse brought to light the conditions of the camp, as well as the extreme military tactics being utilised against the Boer in South Africa under General Kitchener.  After visiting the camp in Bloemfontein Hobhouse visited a number of other camps to survey the wider situation and found conditions much the same.

Add MS 42848 A: example of admittance card for the Camp Hospital at Mafeking

Determined to change the situation, she resolved to take it up with the authorities on her return to England.  One of the Parliamentarians she met was Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who was leader of the opposition.  The report of what Hobhouse had encountered in Bloemfontein is recorded in Campbell-Bannerman’s papers at the British Library (Add MS 41252, ff.244-245).

Add MS 41252 Campbell-Bannerman Papers

On hearing Hobhouse’s account of the camps in South Africa, Campbell-Bannerman was shocked by such ‘methods of barbarism’.  As well describing as the condition of the people in the camps, Hobhouse lamented how British military tactics were the source of this misery.  She explained that the British Army, wherever they went, took care to destroy all means of subsistence.  They did this by burning farms, grains and livestock.  Such tactics intentionally left the women and children with little choice but to move to the British camps or face starvation.  Her meeting with Campbell-Bannerman led him to make a famed speech on the matter at Holborn in June 1901.  He then took forward her complaints to Parliament, as outlined in Campbell-Bannerman’s ‘Notes on South Africa’ (Add MS 41243 A).

Add MS 41243 Campbell-Bannerman Papers

Hobhouse’s protest did not end there.  She sent her report to another Liberal politician, George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon, as recorded in the Ripon Papers (Add MS 43638), and continued to expose the camps in her book The Brunt of the War (1902) which gave testimonies of those who were there.  The book also recorded the number of deaths in the camps, counting them in the tens of thousands and included estimates of the deaths of non-white refugees.  Through this book, knowledge of the squalor of the camps was communicated to the wider public.

Emily Hobhouse and her reports from Bloemfontein gave the British authorities a different perspective on the Boer War and made the camps – which became known as concentration camps – a national scandal.  Her persistence ensured that the conditions of the camps were relayed to Parliament, which was eventually forced to establish the Fawcett commission to investigate.

The signature of Emily Hobhouse on one of her letters to Ripon,Add MS 43638 f.76.

Jessica Gregory
Curatorial Support Officer, Modern Archives and Manuscripts

Further Reading:
Hobhouse, E. The Brunt of the War, (London: Methuen & Co, 1902)
Add MS 41243 A, Campbell-Bannerman Papers, ff.36-37, On Methods of Barbarism. 1901-1902.
Add MS 41252, Campbell-Bannerman Papers, ff. 234-243; (f) reminiscences by Emily Hobhouse relating to South Africa, 1901.
Add MS 43638, The Ripon Papers, ff. 36, 54, 75, 93, 97 Emily Hobhouse, social reformer in South Africa: Correspondence with Lord Ripon: 1901-1906.

In the 18th century there were merchants who traded on a global scale with wide-ranging projects from slaving to government contracting.  David Hancock has studied a group of these merchants based in London who developed the British Atlantic trade, calling them 'Citizens of the World'.

We have been researching the Scottish merchant brothers William and Thomas Collow.  They became residents of Le Havre, owning the ship Gosport & Le Havre Ferry which from 1788 operated as a packet boat sailing between France and Portsmouth.  The ship had previously been engaged in the slave trade and once had a famous Captain, Archibald Dalzel, author of A History of Dahomey.  It is unclear if the Collows were deeply involved with the sailing on a regular basis, but packet boats plying their regular schedules from British coastal ports were a great way for merchants to receive intelligence from Continental Europe.

Plan of Le Havre 1786 from Frédéric de Coninck,  Le Havre, son passé, son présent, son avenir (1869) BL flickr

Whilst they were based in Le Havre, the Collows were arranging insurance for French ships.  Some of this business was via contact with Peter Thellusson, a Lloyd's founder and Bank of England Director, and Alexander Aubert, Governor of London Assurance Company. Both men were close associates of West India merchants Camden, Calvert & King (hereafter CC&K).  William Collow was the London contact for this network, although Thomas Collow was also well connected in his own right through his West Indies slave trading interests.

The Collows shipped tobacco from the American colonies through their Irish merchant partners the Fergusons.  The Irish connections of the Collows and Fergussons allowed them to be part of a well-established and organised trade to France, some of which was 'smuggling'.  There is evidence to suggest that there may be a link to Robert Morris, merchant in America, the supplier of tobacco to the French Farmers General.

There were strong links with Liverpool within the Collow network.  Some came about through the Collow brothers’ dealings with noted slave traders such as Thomas Hodgson and ships’ captains such as Arthur Bold.
 
Thomas Cheap, another of the Collow associates, had successfully negotiated the wine contract to the East India Company for the group.  His partners were the Gordons who also shipped 'specie' or gold coinage from Jamaica on behalf of the British government under contract with London merchant bankers Gordon & Murphy of Jamaica.

East India Company agents such as Charles Lindegren had connections to London merchants such as the Collows and their slave trading associates CC&K.  Lindgren was also a member of the Dundee Arms Freemasonry Lodge in Wapping, as was CC&K patron Sir William Curtis, a prominent City figure.

An important point to remember is how merchants such as CC&K and their agents used a system of 'neutral flags' for their ships. This was done on a global scale with agents in Ostend, India, Macau, China and other ports to enable movement of cargoes without restriction from the East India Company monopoly in the Pacific.  This 'flagging' provoked some serious comment: War in Disguise : or, The frauds of the neutral flags by James Stephens was published in 1805.

Ken Cozens, Greenwich Maritime Centre Affiliate
Derek Morris, Independent Scholar

Further reading:
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (1997).
Stephen D. Behrendt, 'The Journal of an African Slaver, 1789-1792, and the Gold Coast Slave Trade of William Collow', History in Africa (1995).
B.R. Tomlinson, 'From Campsie to Kedgeree: Scottish Enterprise, Asian Trade and the Company Raj', Modern Asian Studies (2002).
James Stephens, War in Disguise : or, The frauds of the neutral flags (1805).

On display in the exhibition Cats on the Page at the British Library is the pamphlet The Pretty, playful, tortoise-shell cat published in 1817.  The illustrator is probably the caricaturist and portrait painter Isaac Robert Cruikshank, often known professionally as just Robert Cruikshank.

Isaac Robert Cruikshank by Frederick William Pailthorpe (1828) NPG D9318 © National Portrait Gallery, London   

Isaac Robert Cruikshank was born in London in 1789.  He and his more famous younger brother George followed in the footsteps of their artist father Isaac.  Biographies of the two brothers tell of Isaac Robert venturing to sea as a teenager during the French Wars.  His parents are said to have secured their son a position as midshipman in the East India Company ship Perseverance.  The story goes that Isaac Robert was left behind at St Helena on the return voyage.  He had gone on shore in command of a boat’s crew, a storm arose, and he was stranded and reported to be lost.  After hiding from press gangs and suffering privations, he was befriended by the governor of the island and went home to England in a whaler.  On the way back, they met with a vessel which gave them news of the battle of Trafalgar.  His appearance on the family doorstep in London was greeted with astonishment as they were in mourning for his death.

I decided to dig into the East India Company archives to see if I could discover more about this interesting tale.  What I found was rather different!  Isaac Cruikshank appears in the crew list for the Perseverance as the purser’s servant, with the rank of seaman rather than junior officer.  The wage and receipt books show that he joined the ship in the Downs on 31 March 1804 for the voyage to China and was discharged on 17 September 1805 when the Perseverance reached England.  His wages were 45 shillings per month; after deductions he was paid £39 10s 6d for service of 17 months and 17 days.  Cruikshank collected and signed for his wages in person at East India House in the City of London on 15 January 1806, four months after arriving back in England.  Where had he been in the interim?  Was the St Helena story concocted to cover the young man’s absence immediately after the ship docked?

I did check the St Helena records to see if there were any clues there.  The Perseverance anchored there on 30 June 1805, and a muster of the crew was taken on 11 July 1805 just before the ship departed.  Cruikshank is in that muster list of crew members and I could find nothing to suggest that anything unusual happened to him.

So a cracking good yarn, but seemingly untrue.  Being told about Trafalgar by a passing ship is a nice touch.  The battle took place on 21 October 1805 but, according to the records of the Perseverance, Cruikshank had been discharged in England a month earlier. 

After Cruikshank’s death in 1856, George Daniel wrote a tribute which mentioned the time his friend had spent at sea. Daniel said that Cruikshank ‘was wont to recall those happy days, when he proudly walked the quarter-deck in the uniform of his sovereign; eager, in his exuberant pugnacity, to fight the battles of his country.  But he was born to be an artist’.

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records

Further reading:
IOR/L/MAR/B/255D Journal of the Perseverance 1804-1805, with a crew list
IOR/L/MAR/B/255K Wage book for the Perseverance 1806-1806
IOR/L/MAR/B/255K2 Receipt book for the Perseverance 1806-1806
IOR/G/32/70 St Helena Consultations 1805
George Daniel, Love’s last labour not lost (London, 1863)
William Bates, George Cruikshank: the artist, the humourist, and the man, with some account of his brother Robert (London, 1878)
William Blanchard Jerrold, The life of George Cruikshank (London, 1882)

Cats on the Page exhibition supported by
 

Today we are marking the anniversary of the opening of the world’s oldest underground railway on 10 January 1863 with a story about the London Tube.

London Underground Railways. 1908. Johnson Riddle & Co. Ltd. London.

When babies were born on the London Underground in 2008 and 2009, the news spread quickly.  Most of the stories noted that the first baby to be born on the Underground was Marie Cordery on 13 May 1924, but said little else about her.

Contemporary newspaper reports paint a vivid picture of the events, albeit with some variations to the story.  According to the Uxbridge & West Drayton Gazette, Mrs Daisy Britannia Kate Hammond of Wealdstone was on her way to hospital on the Bakerloo line when she suddenly became ill at Marylebone.  The other passengers were cleared from the train, which then sped along the lines to a dead end tunnel at Elephant and Castle.  Staff had phoned ahead, and so a Dr Gulley was waiting with an ambulance.  Safely delivered, mother and baby were then taken to Lambeth Infirmary, their departure watched by a crowd of well-wishers.

The Belfast Telegraph published a slightly different version.  It stated that Mrs Hammond was taken ill as the train approached Elephant and Castle Station.  City typists on their way home formed themselves into a screen on the platform whilst porters ran for a doctor.  A  girl was born shortly after the doctor arrived.

A journalist from the Daily Express suggested to Lord Ashfield, Chairman of the Underground Railways, that he should be the baby’s godfather.  Lord Ashfield agreed, although he had some reservations: ‘I should be delighted, if the baby’s parents are willing.  Of course it would not do to encourage this sort of thing, as I am a busy man, but as this is so far as I know an event which is without precedent in the history of the Bakerloo, I think we ought to mark the occasion’.   The baby’s father George Hammond accepted the offer at once.

Birmingham Daily Gazette 15 May 1924 British Newspaper Archive

Suggested names for the baby included Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor, so that her initials would be T.U.B.E., and Jocelyn because she was born during the rush hour.  Her birth was registered in Marylebone as Marie Ashfield Eleanor Hammond.  Marie married George Henry Cordery in 1947 and died in Hillingdon in 2005.

One source suggests that Marie didn’t like travelling on the tube at all when she grew up!

Huw Rowlands
Project Manager, Modern Archives and Manuscripts

Further reading:
Emily Kearns, Underground, Overground: A London Transport Miscellany (Chichester, 2015.) British Library YKL.2017.a.4386
London Underground Railways. 1908. Johnson Riddle & Co. Ltd. London. British Library Maps 3485.(180.)
British Newspaper Archive e.g. Belfast Telegraph 14 & 15 May 1924; Birmingham Daily Gazette 15 May 1924; Uxbridge & West Drayton Gazette Friday 16 May 1924

On 7 January 1785 Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Dr John Jeffries took their lives in their hands and set off across the Channel in a balloon.  It’s no exaggeration to say this was a life and death moment.  French inventor Jean Francois Pilâtre de Rozier and his co-pilot proved this clearly when they crashed and were killed trying to cross the Channel in the opposite direction in June the same year.

Column erected to mark landing place of Blanchard and Jeffries' balloon from A Narrative of the Two Aerial Voyages of Dr. J. with Mons. Blanchard

After a week of detailed preparations, and with the experience of a flight from London into Kent in the previous November, Blanchard and Jeffries prepared to set off from Dover.  With a keen eye on the winds, they first flew a kite, ‘a paper Montgolfier, and a small gaz balloon’, and then they felt sufficiently confident to launch.

During the crossing, they threw their ballast over the side to keep the balloon airborne.  By the time they were half way across, all of this was gone.  At about half past two, about three quarters of the way across, and as the French coast became clearer before them, the balloon started descending again.  This time they were obliged to throw food, fittings, and some of their equipment into the sea.  This included silk oars, constructed in the expectation that they might be able to ‘row’ through the air.  Still they did not rise.  They stripped off their jackets, and Blanchard even threw away his trousers.  Finally the balloon rose again, and onward they flew until they were over land.

The danger continued as they flew fast over dense woodland, dropping closer and closer to the trees.  Fearful that they would yet crash, they looked around for anything else they could do to lighten the load.  They threw off their life jackets made of cork, since they were no longer over the sea, but still they descended.  Finally, continuing to look for weight, Blanchard reflected: 'it almost instantly occurred to me that we could supply it from within ourselves … from the recollection that we had drunk much at breakfast, and not having had any evacuation, and from the severe cold, little or no perspiration had taken place, that probably an extra quantity had been secreted by the kidneys, that we might now avail ourselves of by discharging … we were able to obtain, I verily believe, between five and six pounds of urine; which circumstance, however trivial or ludicrous it may seem, I have reason to believe, was of real utility to us'.

Thus saved from crashing into the trees, as they slowed they were able to grab branches alongside and gradually lower themselves to the ground, at around 4.30 in the afternoon, when they were well met.  'In a short time, many persons made their way to us in the Forest, from whom we received every form of civility and assistance, particularly, in sparing from themselves clothing for us'.

Huw Rowlands
Project Manager, Modern Archives and Manuscripts

Further reading:
John Jeffries and Jean-Pierre Blanchard,, A Narrative of the Two Aerial Voyages of Dr. J. with Mons. Blanchard: With Meteorological Observations and Remarks. The First Voyage on the Thirtieth of November, 1784, from London into Kent: The Second, on the Seventh of January, 1785, from England into France (London, 1786) Online version