Untold lives blog

In the British Library, there is a portrait of Raja Chandu Lal, the famous minister to the Nizam of Hyderabad from 1809 to 1843.  He was an influential figure who was so powerful that the British suspiciously regarded him as the proxy ruler of Hyderabad.  The on-line catalogue entry for the portrait says that it was a gift from 'Mrs Moore'.  Who was she, and why did she have a painting of a man who Hyderabad’s British resident, Sir Charles Metcalfe, described as having 'the plausibility ascribed to Satan'?

British Library, Foster 16 – Portrait of Raja Chandu Lal (1809-1843) by John Godwin Williams (fl.1813-1837), c.1836.  Given to the India Office by Sophia Stewart Moore, née Yates (1808-1905), probably in the 1870s.

Sophia Stewart Yates was born at Madras in 1808.  Her parents, Richard Hassels Yates of the Madras Army and Benjamina, had ten children.  Sophia and her sisters were probably married off quite young, and her brothers would have been sent into the army.  On 29 July 1827, when she was 19, she married John Arthur Moore, an employee of the Nizam of Hyderabad from 1817 to 1838.  He began as a soldier in Hyderabad’s army, then served as the Nizam’s Military Secretary and Auditor of Accounts for 14 years.  He retired from the Nizam’s service for health reasons and returned to Britain with Sophia in 1839.

The painting of Raja Chandu Lal was printed in London as a mezzotint in 1841 by Charles Turner.  The caption below the mezzotint, written in English and Persian, celebrates Raja Chandu Lal as the 'Rajah of Rajahs… the devoted servant of Asuf Jah who is the Roostum of his Age'.   It is impossible to say why the mezzotint was commissioned, but it might relate to Raja Chandu Lal granting Major Moore a generous pension.

British Museum, 1861,0810.148 – Mezzotint of John Godwin Williams’ portrait of Raja Chandu Lal.  Engraved in 1841 by Charles Turner, 50 Warren Street, Fitzroy Square, London.

Unfortunately, the East India Company’s directors in London blocked Major Moore from receiving the pension of 500 rupees a month, claiming that it was 'extremely inexpedient for the Local Government to allow British Officers to be pensioned by the Nizam’s Government or by that of any other Native Prince or Chief'.  Several 'influential men petitioned the Company to allow him to collect the pension, including Charles Metcalfe, the resident at Hyderabad who once described Raja Chandu Lal as 'Satan'.

John Arthur Moore died on 7 July 1860, when Sophia was 52.  Following the East India Company’s liquidation and absorption into the British state, Adolphus Warburton Moore (1841-1887), John and Sophia’s son, became the India Office’s Political Secretary in the 1870s.  He prompted his mother to give the portrait of Raja Chandu Lal to the India Office.

Sophia died in 1905, at the age of 97.  It is intriguing to think that Raja Chandu Lal, a man who the British caricatured as evil, was the subject of a portrait that John and Sophia Moore cherished.  One wonders if young Sophia, who moved to Hyderabad as a teenager and left in her early 30s, personally knew Raja Chandu Lal.  It seems he was kind to her and her husband.

CC-BY Jennifer Howes
Art Historian specialising in South Asia

Creative Commons Attribution licence

Further reading:
Account of John Arthur Moore’s service in India, including letters of support from Charles Metcalfe and Lord Elphinstone to receive a pension from the Nizam of Hyderabad. British Library, IOR/F/4/1780/73179, f.1v-5.
Archer, Mildred. The India Office Collection of Paintings and Sculpture (London: 1986), 47-48.
Foster, William. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Paintings, Statues, &c. in the India Office (London: 1924), 16.
Raja Chandu Lal. 'Translation of a note from the Minister, under date 27th November 1838 to the Resident'. British Library, IOR/F/4/1780/73179, f.19.

William Henry Wilson was an officer in the Bombay Staff Corps in the second half of the 19th century.  Born in Worcester on 13 September 1839, Wilson was appointed to the Indian Army in December 1856, and posted to the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry.  Present during operations against insurgents in the North Canara and Bedee Districts in 1858, he was awarded the Mutiny Medal.  He had a successful army career, and served in the Bombay Police.

Decorated scroll in praise of Wilson 1891 - Mss Eur F764/7/8

In 1870, Wilson was the Superintendent of Police for the Kaira District, and was called on to oversee police arrangements for the fair at Dakore held in April of that year.  The fair was a success and Wilson was commended for the judicious manner in which the arrangements were devised and carried out with due regard to the feelings of the people attending the event.  Wilson noted in his papers that, 'There was a tremendous concourse of people, especially women……The Maharajah wanted to give me a sword but I said government would not approve as I had only done my duty'.

Report on the fair at Dakore 1870 -  Mss Eur F764/7/2

In 1885, Wilson was the District Superintendent of Police at Nasik. I n October of that year, he had to deal with a riot that broke out at Malegaon in the District.  The cause of the riot seemed to be a dispute between members of the Hindu and Muslim communities who were celebrating the festivals of Dasara and Muharram.  The unrest lasted four days and 42 people were arrested.  At one point, a Hindu temple was attacked forcing the police guard to fire on the rioters wounding two men.  The Government commended Wilson and the local Magistrate Mr Frost for their promptitude and discretion.  In Wilson’s copy of the report on the riot, he noted in the margin that, 'It was a hot business' and that leading Muslim leaders had asked him to release the 42 men who had been arrested, to which he had refused.  They were sentenced to terms of imprisonment of between three to eighteen months.

Report of riot at Malegaon 1885  - Mss Eur F764/7/2

In 1887, Wilson, serving as Superintendent of Police in the Poona District, was involved in tracking down a gang of robbers.  Wilson reported that, 'five of the Koli gang of dacoits have surrendered to Inspector Ganpatrao Malhar and that a sixth, who alleges he was pressed into the dacoit’s service against his will, has also given himself up' . Wilson recommended that the reward of Rs.500 should be increased to Rs.1000 and distributed to local villagers 'who have done so well and have suffered in the service'.

Surrender of a gang of dacoits 1887 - Mss Eur F764/7/2

Between 1888 and 1893, Wilson served as Commissioner of Police for the Town and Island of Bombay.  During that time, he met a number of visiting dignitaries, including Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence in 1889.  The following year, he met Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, future Emperor of Russia, who was on a tour of India.  Wilson wrote that it was rather a responsibility for the Governor, Lord Harris, especially as the Indian Government 'were very jumpy'.  Of the Tsesarevich, Wilson wrote, 'He was very unformed in manners & never thanked me'. I n January 1893, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria visited Bombay as part of his tour of India during his trip round the world.  Wilson commented that Lord Harris 'found him a pleasant guest; and he specially thanked me at the railway station on his departure'.

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:
William Henry Wilson’s papers are part of a recently catalogued collection of India Office Private Papers now available to researchers in the British Library’s Asian & African Studies reading room: Papers of the Wilson Family, Mss Eur F764 that charts the family’s connection with India over four generations.
Papers relating to the service history of William Henry Wilson, 1866-1914, shelfmark: Mss Eur F764/7/1.
Official correspondence relating to William Henry Wilson's career, 1860-1893, shelfmark: Mss Eur F764/7/2.

The British government benefitted greatly from a number of structures and processes already in place in the region of South Asia.  An important but not very celebrated one was the use of elephants as a hybrid of machinery and workforce.  Not only did they serve to transport products, they were also essential in routine industrial work like loading and unloading ships.

Elephants at work in Rangoon. Photographer Philip Adolphe  Klier (1845-1911) British Library Photo 88/1(22) 

Elephants at work from Annie Brassey, The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the ‘Sunbeam’, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1889, pp.131 (W51/1046)

Because of their crucial function in the carrying out of human plans, elephants were highly valued.  That made interest and research in those animals flourish and even encouraged the development of vaccines.  However, the knowledge produced was highly focused on productivity and disregarded most local knowledge.

Elephants and their diseases: a treatise on elephants. British Library Or 13916 (f.2r)

The importance of elephants made them vulnerable not only to exploitation but also to smuggling and fraud.  A file in the India Office Records holds correspondence associated with the case of Mr Dalrymple-Clark, Superintendent of the Government kheddas, enclosures to tame and keep wild elephants.

Capturing elephants in Ceylon. c.1825. Military officers supervising the rounding up of elephants. British Library WD2096 

Ian Hew Warrender Clark was born in Chelsea on 1 December 1853, the son of Colonel John Clark and Charlotte Sophia Dalrymple.  He later changed his surname to Dalrymple-Clark.  On 26 November 1873 Dalrymple-Clark joined the Bengal Police Department.  He was promoted to District Superintendent in July 1886, and then appointed Superintendent of Kheddas in Burma in October 1902, a position of responsibility.  However Dalrymple-Clark apparently profited from selling government elephants privately under the name of a Mr Green.  Dalrymple-Clark was said to have reported that an outbreak of anthrax had killed 26 elephants, giving him cover to sell them to private companies in the region himself.  That resulted in him being chased in India and London by deputy superintendent Mr Soord.  Having retired to England, he was arrested in London in December 1909 under the Fugitive Offenders Act and prosecuted for breach of trust and falsification of accounts.

Enquiry regarding Dalrymple-Clark IOR/L/PJ/6/504, File 456

In early 1910, Dalrymple-Clark returned to face trial in Rangoon.  In July, after a trial involving an elephant identity parade, he was found not guilty of criminal breach of trust.  In February 1911 he was cleared of falsifying elephant returns.  His assistant superintendent, John Briscoe Birch, and two Indian members of staff, Mukerji and Gupta, were convicted of criminal breach of trust and sentenced to five years in prison.

The India Office Records holds published and manuscript material from circa 1600 to 1948 and relating to the British experience in India, including both official and private papers.  The Legal Adviser’s Records (IOR/L/L) hold the records of cases of legal dispute in British territory in South Asia.  That material is invaluable in providing interesting insights into local entanglements between human, animal and environmental agents.

Bianca Miranda Cardoso
Manuscripts Cataloguer

Further reading:
IOR/L/L/8/178 Correspondence associated with the case of Dalrymple-Clarke, prosecuted for breach of trust and falsification of accounts regarding Government elephants and arrested in London under the Fugitive Offenders Act, Dec 1909-Oct 1911.
IOR/L/PJ/6/1061, File 432 - Allowances for Mr Soord while on deputation to England in connection with the criminal prosecution of Mr Dalrymple-Clark.
British Newspaper Archive- many articles on the ‘Kheddah cases’
Colonizing elephants: animal agency, undead capital and imperial science in British Burma | BJHS Themes | Cambridge Core 2, 169-189. 
Saha, J. (2021). Vital Resources. In Colonizing Animals (pp. 51-82). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
How to ship your elephant 

In 1859 a British Army medical officer, Henry Huggins Jones, published a booklet: Western Australia, recommended as a sanatorium, for the restoration to health and usefulness of European soldiers, prostrated by those diseases of India, for which the climate of the hill stations does not afford a remedy.

Title page of Western Australia, recommended as a sanatorium, for the restoration to health and usefulness of European soldiers

The ‘invaliding season’ in India started at the end of autumn.  Regimental officers put forward the names of men incapacitated for further Indian service.  The annual invaliding board then passed the men who usually went back to the UK.  If other men showed symptoms of needing a change of climate after the board had met, the army surgeon had no alternative but to carry on treating them unless the regiment was stationed within reach of a sanatorium.  Jones believed that men were dying unnecessarily and proposed that they be taken from India to Western Australia.  The voyage by steam vessel would be beneficial because of the ‘health-reviving influence of the S.E. trade wind’.

Jones criticised military hygiene – cramped living quarters, stinking urinals, ‘confined’ bathrooms, bad drainage, imperfect clothing, unfiltered water, badly managed cooking.  Western Australia offered a plentiful supply of fresh water, natural products and food crops.  It was free from epidemics which hit other parts of Australia.  There were few fever cases, and no syphilis.  Dysentery, diarrhoea, and liver disease were rare.  The climate was healthy: from mid-March to the beginning of November ‘not surpassed by any in the world’.  During April to October ’there is an elasticity of the atmosphere indescribably exhilarating, when nature allows a license to the European, denied to the resident of India.  Man feels intended not to die’.

The advantages of the plan were said to be:
• Many useful lives would not be lost in India.
• Soldiers might like Australia and take their discharge to settle there rather than be invalided to the UK.
• Once their health improved, soldiers could be dispersed throughout the colony to strengthen the military presence.
• If there was another uprising in India, an immediate large force would be available in Australia.

A principal hospital at Perth and convalescent barracks in different parts of the colony could be staffed with medical officers from India who had suffered from the climate.  Once recovered, soldiers could be returned to India in early November to avoid the hot season when temperatures could reach over 100˚F.  This heat caused lassitude ‘though totally differing from the same sensation experienced in India’.

Henry Huggins Jones had been born in India.  He was baptised in Calcutta on 8 February 1824, the son of John Benjamin Jones, a writer in Palmers & Co’s office, and his wife Frances.  He joined the British Army as a surgeon and served in both India and Australia.  In 1854 Jones married Frances (Fanny) Brockman at Gingin in Western Australia.  Henry and Fanny had eight children, born across the globe where the Army postings took them: Australia, India, Ireland and Gibraltar.

Jones was appointed to the rank of Surgeon Major in January 1869 on completion of 20 years’ service.  However he died on 21 May 1869 at his home in Bristol aged 46, leaving Fanny to raise their family, the youngest aged just eleven months.  Fanny did not remarry and died in Bristol on 21 February 1925.

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records

Further reading:
Jones’s postings to different British Army regiments can be traced through the British Newspaper Archive – his name is often recorded as Henry Higgins Jones.

My recent blog post  ‘100 Years in the Service of the East India Company’, which told the story of seven Barker men in the employ of the Company, prompted one reader to ask, ‘…but what about the women?’

By comparison with men, there are relatively few records that describe the lives of Company women in any detail.  When they are mentioned, women are often referred to as Miss or Mrs XYZ without a first name or initials.

Here is what I have managed to discover about three of the Barker women.

Maria de Perpetua Pereira was the wife of sea captain Robert Barker.  Between 1807 and 1816, Maria gave birth to four children in Rio de Janeiro.  Her name was only fully revealed on the death certificate of her daughter Maria in Glasgow in 1907.  Her first child, John Thomas Barker, was conceived in 1807 during Captain Barker’s last Company voyage in the Northampton.  Maria appears in the passenger list of that ship as Mrs Barker, travelling with a servant.  I do not know the date and place of her birth, marriage or death, nor where she met Barker.

Passengers aboard the Northampton for the return voyage from Bengal, September 1806
Source: The British Library, India Office Records and Papers, Northampton Journal: IOR/L/MAR/B/198D 19 Apr 1805 - 15 May 1807, Passenger List (Cropped)

Frances Brown Barker married Reverend Joseph Laurie on 6 October 1822 at the Troqueer Church in Dumfries.  She was 32 and five years his senior.  Two weeks later they were aboard the Theodosia sailing from Liverpool to Bombay where Joseph was to be Junior Minister of the Church of Scotland.  The Company allowed Frances to journey with him ‘at no expense to the Company’.

Joseph Laurie’s appointment and permission to take Frances to India at no expense to the Company, 25 September 1822 (Cropped). See also p.541 Sureties for the couple, 9 October 1822.
Source: The British Library, India Office Records and Papers, IOR/B/175 p.514.

Their first child Robert was born on 21 September 1823.  Frances gave birth to three more children at Colaba, Bombay, the younger two dying as infants.  The two surviving boys travelled to Scotland to be educated at Annan College, Dumfries and Edinburgh Academy, but I have been unable to resolve whether Frances accompanied them back to the UK.

Frances and Joseph returned to the UK for good in 1841.  She pre-deceased her husband in 1865 when they were living in Bristol.

Ann Goldie married Thomas Brown Barker, East India Company Surgeon, in 1826.  Ann was 27, he was 30.  In 1828 Ann accompanied Thomas back to India, again at no cost to the Company, sailing in the Robarts under Captain Joseph Corbyn.

It was an eventful voyage.  The ship became de-masted in the Bay of Biscay and had to return to Plymouth for repairs.  Then the Captain announced that he intended to make an unscheduled stop at Tristan da Cunha for water and that passengers would need to forego soup, tea and rolls to conserve supplies.  The male passengers signed a letter, drawing the captain’s attention to the large number of dogs on board consuming water.  Corbyn’s response was to have the 38 dogs thrown overboard.

At the conclusion of the voyage, passenger Daniel Cullimore brought a lawsuit against Captain Corbyn for trespass, assault and false imprisonment after being confined below decks.  Thomas gave a character witness for Cullimore at the trial, and Corbyn was found to be at fault.

On 31 January 1848, Ann and Thomas set sail for England from Calcutta aboard the Gloriana.  However, Thomas died on 16 March as the ship was sailing towards the Cape of Good Hope.  Ann received an annual widow’s pension from the Company of £250 6s 4d effective from 17 March 1848 until she died in 1866.

Bengal Military Fund: Register of pensioners and pension payments, IOR/L/AG/23/6/3 : Jul 1866-Dec 1871 Establishment no. 126. (Cropped)

CC-BY
Mark Williams
Independent Researcher

Creative Commons Attribution licence

Further reading:
East India Company Court of Director Minutes e.g. IOR/B/181 p. 363 and p. 370.
British Newspaper Archive e.g. Morning Herald, 1 June 1848, p.4.
Asiatic Intelligence, The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register […], Vol. 1-New Series (January to April 1830), (London: Parbury and Allen, 1830), pp. 38-44.

In the early decades of the 20th century the Government of India became increasingly concerned by the publication and circulation of what they perceived as anti-British or seditious publications.  This was a particular concern following the Amritsar massacre which sparked protests across India.  One small collection in the India Office Private Papers gives an interesting glimpse of the efforts of government to suppress these publications.

These are a collection of notifications issued by the Government of the United Provinces.  The notifications give the legislation used and details of the publication suppressed.  A government reviewer had also listed the paragraphs or lines of particular concern.  The legislation used was section 99 of the 1898 Code of Criminal Procedure, and section 12 of the Indian Press Act of 1910.  These pieces of legislation allowed the authorities to declare such books, newspapers or other documents forfeited to His Majesty.  Police officers could then seize them.

Notification about book in Hindi - How America Acquired Independence

One of the defining events, which galvanised the campaign for Indian independence, was the Amritsar massacre.  Many Indian writers and publishers took this as a subject in calling for resistance to British rule in India.  One collection of poems, ‘Jallianwala Bagh ka Mahatma’, has the line ‘Jallianwala Bagh will be immortal in the world’, and in another of the poems is written: ‘It is Jallianwala Bagh, where the martyrs of the motherland and the gems of the country were robbed’.  It goes on to advise the public to consider the Jallianwala Bagh a place of pilgrimage [folio 21]. 

Notification about 'Gandhi-ki-gazlen'

Another pamphlet in Hindi ,‘Gandhi-ki-gazlen’, predicted ‘Scenes of Jallianwala Bagh will be repeated in every city if this Government is not driven out of this country’ [folio 48].  The reviewer noted that the writer urged Indians to follow non-cooperation and emphasised the adoption of swadeshi goods.

Notification about 'Asahyog Kajli'

The campaign to boycott British goods and use Indian products, known as swadeshi, features in many of the publications.  For instance, a pamphlet in Hindi entitled ‘Asahyog Kajli’ encouraged people to use the spinning wheel (charkha) and weave cloth for their use [folio 17]. 

Notification about 'Sawan Swaraj'

Another pamphlet in Hindi, ‘Sawan Swaraj’, written by Sallar Maharaj contain songs with the lines: ‘By working at charkhas the enemy will disappear from our sight and from India’ [folio 19].  The non-cooperation campaigns led by Gandhi are a common theme. 

Notification about 'Swaraj Pratiqya'

One pamphlet in Hindi, ‘Swaraj Pratiqya’, collected poems on the subject.  One line urged: ‘Let us take the vow of non-violent non-co-operation with all resoluteness and let us try soon to liberate India from the unlawful possession of the unjust’.  A similar tone was taken in another line: ‘Let there be new sacrifices made on the altar of liberty and let us all be proud of our mother tongue and of swadeshi clothes’ [folio 118].

Notification about leaflet addressed to Gurkha troops

One notification concerns a leaflet in Nepalese addressed to Gurkha troops.  Printed and published anonymously it warned: ‘Just as an insect eats the wall from the inside and makes it hollow in the same way the foreign nation (British) which is deceitful and dishonest is going to make us hollow’.  It urges Gurkha soldiers to ‘Leave the services and protect your brothers’ [folio 75].

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:
India Office unregistered files containing copies of notifications issued by the Government of the United Provinces proscribing seditious publications, together with translations and summaries of the literature, 1910-1930, reference Mss Eur F242.

Records relating to seditious or proscribed publications can be found in the Public & Judicial Department records series (IOR/L/PJ).

Indian Press Act, 1910. 

Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898.  

Publications proscribed by the Government of India: a catalogue of the collections in the India Office Library and Records and the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, British Library Reference Division, edited by Graham Shaw and Mary Lloyd (London: British Library, 1985).

In my recent post about Charles Daniels, an ex-soldier sent adrift upon the world, I asked if anyone could help me find what happened to his wife Catherine after the death of her second husband Sergeant John Shillcock in 1855.  One of our readers has pointed me in the direction of the Agra Fort Directory of 1857 where a widow ‘Mrs C Shilcock’ is listed.

Agra Fort Directory 1857 - India Office Private Papers Mss Eur D385 

The directory was based on a census taken by Assistant Surgeon James Pattison Walker of 5,845 people sleeping in the Fort on 27 July 1857 .  They were seeking refuge from the Indian Uprising.  Nearly 2,000 Europeans are named - soldiers, civil servants, surgeons, teachers, priests, nuns, railway employees, merchants, craftsmen, bankers, indigo planters, and wives, widows, and children.  There were also 1542 ‘East Indians’, 858 ‘Native Christians’, 1157 ‘Hindoos’, and 229 ‘Mahomedans’, but no names are recorded for these groups.

Numbers of people sleeping in Agra Fort 26-27 July 1857

Mrs Shillcock was living in Block F of the Fort.  A fellow resident was twenty-year-old Rosa Mary Coopland. Her husband, chaplain George William Coopland, had been killed at Gwalior in June 1857.  Their son George Bertram Philpott was born in Agra Fort on 8 August.

Agra Fort Directory showing entry for Mrs C Shilcock

In 1859 Rosa Mary Coopland published a memoir of her escape from Gwalior and life in Agra Fort,.  She described life in the Fort – the noise and confusion of people settling into their quarters; the staff of sweepers paid by the authorities to keep the interior clean; the butchers, bakers and laundrymen carrying on their trades within the walls; the laying-out of gardens; the making of coffins.

Agra Fort - garrison orders 1 July 1857 - India Office Private Papers Mss Eur D385 

The Agra civil servants had comparatively comfortable quarters in the gardens.  A large marble hall there was used as a business office and as a church on Sundays.  The military officers and their families lived in tents, as did the Roman Catholic Archbishop and his clergy.  The highest military ranks occupied a row of small houses, and their soldiers lived in barracks.  Nuns created a school and a chapel in the place where the gun carriages had stood.  Shopkeepers and merchants made small thatched huts, and ‘every available place was crammed’, with people ‘almost as closely packed as bees in a hive’.

The memoir also told the story of a woman killed at Gwalior.  Mrs Coopland couldn’t remember the woman's name, but she was the widow of a conductor in the commissariat who had risen from the ranks and saved a great deal of money.  He had died shortly before the Uprising and his widow had buried his boxes of treasure for safety.  Apparently some sepoys demanded the treasure and shot the woman when she refused to show them the hiding place.

The dead woman was Catherine Shillcock’s elder sister Maria.  She had married Andrew Burrows, a private in HM 87th Foot, on 22 October 1821 at Fort William. They had at least seven children, with three dying as infants.

By 1857 Andrew was Deputy Commissary of Ordnance attached to the Gwalior Magazine.  He died on 14 May 1857.  His will made in 1843 left everything to Maria, but did not name an executor. As Maria was dead, the estate was settled by the Administrator General in Bengal.

On 31 July 1858 a funeral service was read at Gwalior over the remains of those who died there in June 1857, including those of George William Coopland and Maria Burrows.

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records

Further reading:
Mss Eur D385 Agra Fort Directory 1857 and Garrison Orders I July 1857 in Charles Lamont Robertson Glasfurd papers.
R M Coopland, A lady’s escape from Gwalior and life in the Fort of Agra during the mutinies of 1857 (London 1859).
IOR/N/1/8 f.186 Baptism of Maria Griffiths 10 August 1809.
IOR/N/1/11 f.566 Marriage of Maria Griffiths to Andrew Burrows 22 October 1821.
IOR/N/1/94 p.140 Funeral service read at Gwalior on 31 July 1858 over remains, including those of George William Coopland, died 15 June 1857, and Maria Burrows, who died 14 June 1857.
Will and estate papers of Andrew Burrows IOR/L/AG/34/29/100 pp.210-214 & 534-535; IOR/L/AG/34/27/165 p.266; IOR/L/AG/34/27/169 p.285.

In a previous post, I promised to share any further discoveries about the Dessa family, whose son George Edward Dessa (d. 1913) had attempted to assassinate Viceroy Lord Lytton whilst struggling with mental health problems.

George’s mother, Ann Elizabeth Dessa (otherwise De Sa) had undergone her own mental health struggles, having been admitted to the Bhowanipore (Bhawanipur) Lunatic Asylum in 1849.  A snapshot of Bhowanipore in 1856-57 certainly challenges perceived notions of Victorian lunatic asylums.  Sited on a two-acre plot south of Fort William, its well laid out gardens were said to ‘impart to the Asylum a pleasing feature of rural quiet’.  The boundary walls were hidden by climbing plants. Emphasis was on the circulation of fresh air, hygiene, liberal quantities of well-cooked quality food, and kindness, the latter being ‘the real substitute for mechanical restraint’.  Ann Elizabeth was released back into the care of her family in 1874, having been institutionalised for a quarter of a century.  She died in Calcutta on 12 December 1888.

We can find a little more about Ann Elizabeth's background in the records.  She was born on 15 October 1818 at Mirzapur, daughter of Jacob Rogers and his wife Elizabeth, and was baptised there on 10 August 1821.  According to the East India Register, she married George Henry Dessa, a writer, at Chuprah on 11 October 1832, days before her fourteenth birthday.  Entries in the East India Register refer to the birth of two sons, on 23 May 1837 and 22 October 1843.  These are possibly her sons William David and George Edward, although we know she and her husband had at least three boys, the youngest of whom died aged 12.  The family moved to Calcutta, and appear to have suffered from financial difficulties despite George Henry working in various government roles such as in the Civil Auditor’s Office, and later on the East Indian Railway.  There are five entries in the London Gazette between 1842 and 1862 referring to petitions filed in the Court of Relief of Insolvent Debtors naming George Henry Dessa.

Portrait of Jacob Rogers by Jiwan Ram, Bodleian Library LP 846. Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Terms of use: CC-BY-NC 4.0. 

It should have been so different for Ann Elizabeth. Her father Lieutenant Jacob Rogers had been in the service of Maharaja Daulat Rao Scindia, the ruler of Gwalior state, and was an East India Company pensioner.  A portrait of him by the Indian artist Jiwan Ram entitled ‘Quartermaster Rogers’ survives; it once formed part of the collection of the Begum Samru (Joanna Nobilis Sombre) at Sardhana palace.  Bought by T. R. Wyer, a Collector in Meerut, in 1894, it was gifted to the Indian Institute, 1913 and now forms part of the Bodleian Library collections. 

 Copy of the will of Jacob Rogers dated 12 March 1819 IOR/L/AG/34/29/36, pp.97-100

Ann’s early life was comfortable, living in a bungalow in Mirzapore surrounded with servants and possessions, all of which Jacob left to his wife Elizabeth in his will written of 1819. Jacob’s death on 10 January 1824, age 41, changed everything; the worth of Rogers’ estate was almost identical to the outstanding claims against it, effectively leaving few assets for his wife and daughter. All his belongings – books, furniture, pictures, carpets, guns, plate, jewellery, clothing, horses, buggy – were sold at public auction just weeks after his death.

Estate  papers of Jacob Rogers showing his servants' wages IOR/L/AG/34/27/81 p.659

Lesley Shapland
Cataloguer, India Office Records

Further Reading:
Report by Theodore Cantor, Superintendent of the Asylums… at Bhowanipore and Dullunda for 1856-57 can be found online.  
Sir Evan Cotton ‘The Sardhana Pictures in Government House, Allahabad’, Bengal Past and Present vol LII, part I (1936).

British Library India Office Records available via Findmypast -
IOR/N/1/64, f.43 Baptism of Ann Elizabeth Rogers (later Dessa), 10 Aug 1821 at Mirzapore.
IOR/L/AG/34/29/36, pp.97-100 Copy of the will of Jacob Rogers dated 12 Mar 1819, proved 25 Feb 1824.
IOR/L/AG/34/27/81, pp. 641-661 Inventory of the estate of Jacob Rogers, including a catalogue of the sale of his goods at auction.
IOR/L/AG/34/27/80, pp.618-619 and IOR/L/AG/34/27/80, pp. 702-704 Accounts relating to the estate of Jacob Rogers.