Untold lives blog

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the problem of rotten teeth was a concern that spanned the classes, although with the price of early dentures ranging from between half a guinea to forty pounds, only those from the upper ranks could afford to do very much about it. Early false teeth were heavy and largely for show, incapable of allowing intelligible speech and seldom secure enough to permit chewing. Indeed, various social historians have claimed that the inadequacy of early dentures was one of the main reasons behind the Victorian upper class vogue for eating in one’s bedroom before dinner to insure against embarrassment at the table. Frequently made from ivory or bone and with no enamel to protect them, early dentures were highly susceptible to decay, which often led to infection and vile-smelling breath, and those that weren’t, though they were less prone to rotting, had a rather more unpleasant provenance.

Evanion Collection 6450   

On 18 June 1815, the French Army was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo. This culmination of some twelve years of war between France and the opposing European coalition may have effectively ended the political and military career of Napoleon and led to the deaths of in excess of 51,000 men, but it was not without its curious benefits. For during the first half of the nineteenth century, the most popular and profitable breed of dentures available were those made from genuine second-hand teeth, a sudden surfeit of which had just been rendered effectively up-for-grabs by the cull of 1815. These so-called “Waterloo Teeth” – a moniker which quickly became applicable to any set of teeth pilfered from the mouth of a dead soldier and continued in use throughout the Crimean and American Civil Wars – were vastly preferable to those more commonly used in the eighteenth century. These pre-war teeth were frequently acquired from executed criminals, exhumed bodies, dentists’ patients and even animals and were consequently often rotten, worn down or loaded with syphilis. The prospect of an overabundance of young, healthy teeth to be readily pillaged from the battlefield must have been a dentist’s dream.

Evanion Collection 5389

This fashion for “genuine” dentures, popular though it was, was nonetheless dogged by unappealing “graverobber” connotations and it was consequently during the mid-nineteenth century that more sustainable and palatable styles of false teeth came to the fore. Porcelain teeth, which had actually been in use as far back as the 1770s but had struggled with a tendency to chip, underwent a great transformation thanks to Claudius Ash, a silver and goldsmith who brought his expertise to dentures in the 1820s and 30s when he started manufacturing porcelain teeth mounted on gold plates, with gold springs and wire to hold them in place and make them easier to talk and eat with. Ash & Sons, which became a successful company, went on to devise dental plates made of vulcanite and silver, as well as sickle-shaped metal insets to stabilise single false teeth, aluminium and gold mesh dental strengtheners and silicate cement for fillings, among much else. It was from here that the manufacturing of false teeth really took off, with dentists’ advertisements from the British Library Evanion Collection showcasing the sudden diversity of materials and plates available – from platinum to 18 carat gold. That said, the use of the genuine article in the manufacturing of Victorian dentures did not let up throughout much of the late nineteenth century and it was not until the early twentieth century that one could be certain not to find anyone smiling at you with a set of dead men’s teeth.

Julia Armfield
Intern, Printed Historical Resources    



Further reading:
John Woodforde, The Strange Story of False Teeth, (London, 1968)

Stephanie Pain, “The Great Tooth Robbery” in The New Scientist  (London, 16 June 2001)

BBC H2G2, Waterloo Teeth, A History of Dentures  (August 24, 2005)

To whet our readers’ appetite for stories related to the commemoration of World War I over the next year or so, here are snippets of an 'untold life' pieced together from two sources in the India Office Records.
 
Joseph Alexander Faithful was a young Anglo-Indian who set out from Calcutta in the spring of 1914 to travel to Europe with the goal of training as a mechanical engineer. Working his passage as a deck hand on the S.S. Nordmark, he had no way of knowing that power politics were conspiring against him, and when he reached Hamburg in late July he was interned. This seems more than a little harsh, as he was then aged only sixteen and war between Britain and Germany was not formally declared until 4 August. Three long years later he was moved to Havelburg POW camp, but he had to endure two punishing stints working in the Steinforde salt mine near Hanover before the British Red Cross was able to arrange his transfer to England in May 1919, a full six months after the Armistice. 
 
However Joseph’s problems were not about to end. Drifting from one youth hostel to another, and with little or no contact with his family back in Calcutta, he eventually found accommodation in Stockwell Park Road, S.W.9, from where he sent plaintive appeals to the India Office asking for money to buy clothes to see him through the European winter, and to secure a place on a course in telegraphy (his experiences in the salt mine perhaps having put him off a career in engineering). Hanging over him all the while was the fear that some of the Indian nationals who had been imprisoned alongside him in Germany would smear him as someone who had worked a little too enthusiastically for his captors.  The file includes correspondence with the British Military Mission in Berlin and the Committee of Enquiry into Breaches of the Law of War as the mandarins in Whitehall attempted to confirm that he had been more sinned against than sinning. Joseph’s plight attracted a degree of sympathy and more than once a civil servant refers to him as "the lad" when arguing the merits of his case with his bureaucratic seniors.

IOR/L/F/8/20/1612  Articles of Agreement between Joseph Alexander Faithful and the Secretary of State for India

There is a happy ending to the story.  In 1921, Joseph Faithful signed articles of agreement for a post as a general service clerk in the Indo-European Telegraph Department at a salary of 300 rupees per month; furthermore, that staple of biographical information the ecclesiastical returns series shows that he later married in Karachi in June 1934. As Britain, India and Germany all began to come to terms from their different national perspectives with the aftermath of the War, and as the world reeled from the influenza epidemic that was to kill more people than the fighting itself, it is salutary to be reminded that history and archival sources encompass the fate of the ordinary as well as the great.
 
Hedley Sutton
Asian & African Studies Reference Services


Further reading:
Joseph’s story is taken from these files in the India Office Records -

IOR/L/MIL/7/18795

IOR/L/F/8/20/1612

IOR/N/3/151/183 Marriage to Hildred Joyce Dique

One night in June 1940, ‘Abd al-Razzaq Razuqi, the British Residency Agent in Sharjah put on a disguise and walked to the palace of Shaikh Sultan bin Saqr Al Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah. After hearing reports that the Shaikh was playing German government radio broadcasts in Arabic so loudly that they could be heard 200 yards away, Razuqi - who is usually referred to as Abdur Razzaq in the India Office Records - wanted to establish for himself if the rumours were true.

After his visit Razuqi wrote to the British Political Agent in Bahrain, Hugh Weightman, explaining that “a large crowd gathers there [the palace] to hear the German news” and that “some people had been talking freely in the town about the mighty power of Germany and the collapse of France which would soon be followed by the complete crush of Britain”. He also reported that the slogans ‘Long live Hitler’ and ‘Right is with Germany’ had been chalked on walls in the town. Razuqi established that the primary source of this anti-British sentiment was the Shaikh’s secretary, Abdullah bin Faris. Razuqi wrote that although the Secretary was full of praise for the British government to his face, “behind the curtain” he had induced ordinary people under his influence to spread rumours about the victories of the Germans.

Although reports of German radio broadcasts in Arabic and the existence of pro-German sentiment in a desert town on the Persian Gulf coast may seem incongruous, given the large-scale propaganda efforts that the German government directed towards the Middle East during World War II, they are not in fact surprising. Between 1939 and 1945, the German government broadcast Arabic language programmes to the Middle East and North Africa seven days a week.

The Arabic broadcasts on German radio presented the Nazi regime as staunch supporters of anti-imperialism, especially against Britain. Unsurprisingly they found a receptive ear amongst individuals under the indirect control of British colonial authorities; and at a time when – after the fall of France in May 1940 – the prospect of Britain losing the war against Germany was real. Razuqi and his superiors were fully aware of the importance of quelling any anti-British/pro-German sentiment and took the matter seriously. Razuqi confronted the Shaikh about his activities, and demanded an explanation.

IOR/R/15/1/281 Shaikh Sultan sends letter to British agent proclaiming his loyalty to Britain July 1940 

Responding in July 1940, Shaikh Sultan sent a letter to Weightman proclaiming his absolute loyalty to Britain and wholly denying the accusations made against his secretary bin Faris. The Shaikh stated that “under all circumstances in this war we are the enemies of Germany and Italy and their followers”.

In October 1940, Razuqi reported to Weightman that after his warnings the Shaikh was now “avoiding all talks and topics about the Germans and Italians and is doing his best to show that he is the most loyal and sincere friend of the British government”.

IOR/R/15/1/281  Razuqi reports that the Shaikh and his secretary now refrain from Pro-Nazi talk 

This incident illustrates not only the surprising geographical and linguistic extent of German propaganda efforts during World War II, but also how dangerous British authorities considered such efforts, even in far-flung parts of its global empire, thousands of miles away from continental Europe, the main field of conflict at that time.

Louis Allday, Gulf History Specialist       Tweet @Louis_Allday
British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Qatar Digital Library

Gulf History Project

Today’s blog post commemorates the Battle of Waterloo which was fought on 18 June 1815. But it is not about those famous leaders the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon Bonaparte, or military tactics. It is the story of a horse stolen at Waterloo and the man who took her.

As the battle dust started to settle, Captain John Tucker of the 1st Battalion 27th Regiment of Foot decided to take advantage of the chaos and ‘forcibly took and converted to his own use a certain bay mare, belonging to some British regiment of dragoons, or regiment, or officer, or soldier in the British pay’.

The Battle of Waterloo from The wars of Wellington, a narrative poem (London, 1819)  Images Online 

Contrary to the orders of the High Command forbidding all profiteering, Tucker took the horse and removed the regimental mark from its side.  Man and horse then journeyed to Brussels. The whole affair would probably have gone unnoticed, but Tucker wanted to sell the mare and put an advert in Galignani’s Messenger, an English-language newspaper published in Paris at that time. That was unwise and the authorities took the horse back on 17 September 1815.

After rejoining his regiment in Paris, Tucker faced a court-martial on five charges of ‘scandalous and infamous conduct, unbecoming the character of an officer and a gentleman’. As well as the horse, he was accused of stealing the property of his fellow officer Captain Holmes who had been killed in the battle. Tucker was said to have opened Holmes’ ‘portmanteau, trunk, and canteen, and other baggage’, and to have taken the contents. He was found guilty of stealing the mare and guilty of ‘great impropriety’ concerning Holmes’ belongings. He was sentenced to be dismissed from the service. However Tucker was recommended to mercy and he was placed on half-pay.  His commanding officer Colonel Warren was criticised by the court for ‘living in habits of social intercourse with the prisoner’ and neglecting to press charges sooner. The court also suspected that the charges against Tucker had been brought because he had disagreed with his fellow officers over ‘irregular proceedings’ involving Lieutenant Alexander Fraser who was allowed to resign rather than face a court-martial. Fraser was later re-admitted to the regiment. The entire officer corps of the 27th Regiment of Foot received a reprimand from the court. 

Tucker’s half-pay punishment does not appear to have been implemented and he transferred to the 8th Regiment of Foot.  He left the Army in 1822 after a second court-martial found him guilty of threatening behaviour and being absent without leave.  In 1846 he published a life of the Duke of Wellington and he died in 1852.


Dorota Walker
Reference Specialist, Asian and African Studies     


Further reading:
Captain Hough, The practice of courts-martial (London, 1825)

Today is International Archives Day.

Image from International Council on Archives

To mark this, we have a story about the Duke of Wellington and some archives in London.

In 1832 the Commissioners on the Public Records of the Kingdom made a visit to the Tower of London.  After inspecting the records stored in the Wakefield and White Towers they noted that there was a store of gunpowder in the magazine beneath the White Tower. Charles Purton Cooper, Secretary to the Commissioners, wrote about this to the Duke of Wellington, who was Governor of the Tower. The Duke replied ‘that the care of the Gunpowder in the Tower of London is under the exclusive direction of the Master-General of the Ordnance’ and suggested that ‘if the Commissioners upon the Public Records should think that the Gunpowder is exposed to any danger, they should apply to that office’.

Tower of London - From  London Town by Felix Leigh (1883)  Images Online 

The Duke’s facetious remark did not have the effect of spurring the Commissioners to move the records to a safer place as soon as possible. Cooper entered into correspondence with the Ordnance Board asking for the gunpowder to be removed from the White Tower. In reply he received ‘a very elaborate letter’ suggesting that the records should be removed rather than the ammunition. 

The story was later recounted in the press.  Newspaper articles noted the Duke’s ‘tender care’ for the gunpowder and remarked that he ‘displayed more of a soldier than an archivist’. But the moral of this story on International Archives Day must surely be:

Gunpowder + Archives = Bad Idea.

Margaret Makepeace  Lead Curator, East India Company Records

Further reading  -

More on International Archives Day 2013 .

Proceedings of His Majesty’s Commissioners on the Public Records of the Kingdom, June 1832-August 1833 (London, 1833).

British Newspaper Archive Morning Post 30 September 1840; The Examiner 6 November 1841.

We continue our series of stories on campaigns for women's rights with a post by guest blogger Elizabeth Crawford about Emily Wilding Davison and her friends.

Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral procession approaching St George’s, Bloomsbury, where a memorial service was held on 14 June 1913. The Emily Davison Club was later housed very close by, at 144 High Holborn.  Picture supplied by Elizabeth Crawford.

Emily Wilding Davison died on 8 June 1913, four days after attempting to bring the ‘Votes for Women’ message before the public - and the King - on the Derby racecourse. On 14 June 1913 the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), of which she was an active, unpaid supporter, organized a magnificently solemn procession that accompanied her coffin through London.

We now recognise that, although Emily Wilding Davison’s action resulted in her death, nothing else in the long history of the suffrage movement has brought such spectacular publicity to the campaign. This was not, however, a foregone conclusion, for, with the outbreak of war in August 1914, everything changed. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the leaders of the WSPU, announced that they would be supporting the government’s war effort and that the ‘votes for women’ campaign was suspended. However, a year later, in October 1915, some former members of the WSPU resisted this dictat. Holding a protest meeting, they formed themselves into a new group, the Suffragettes of the WSPU.

The instigator was Mrs Rose Lamartine Yates, the dynamic leader of the Wimbledon branch of the WSPU, who declared that ‘only by the attainment of the aims for which the women of the WSPU have striven and suffered can the uplifting of the human race be achieved’.  She had long been a friend of Emily Davison and had rushed to Emily’s bedside as she lay dying. The Suffragettes of the WSPU were not prepared to allow the sacrifice, as they saw it, that Emily Davison and others had made to be cast aside at the whim of the Pankhursts.

Brooch owned by Mary Leigh, encloses photographic portrait of Emily Wilding Davison. Picture supplied by Elizabeth Crawford.

 Also in 1915, motivated by similar sentiments, Mary Leigh, who had been one of the most militant members of the WSPU and a woman whom Emily Davison had called ‘comrade’, founded the Emily Davison Lodge (later renamed the Emily Davison Club). Both the Suffragettes of the WSPU and the Emily Davison Club were based at 144 High Holborn, the headquarters of the Women’s Freedom League. The Club, whose first secretary was Mrs Alice Green, with whom it is thought Emily Davison had been staying on the night before the Derby, was the scene of some memorable gatherings. The Emily Davison Club, with associated café, was still in existence in 1940.

Rose Lamartine Yates, unwilling to leave the shaping of the history of the suffragette movement to the vagaries of time, was in 1939 the driving force behind the setting up of the Suffragette Record Room in which to showcase suffragette memorabilia. This method of perpetuating the suffragette story has been highly successful in that the collection now forms the heart of the Suffragette Fellowship Collection held by the Museum of London.

Reverse of the brooch, with Mary Leigh’s defiant annotation. Picture supplied by Elizabeth Crawford.

For her part, until the late 1970s Mary Leigh continued into impoverished old age to travel north to lay flowers on Emily Davison’s Morpeth grave on the anniversary of the Derby. Her papers, which include her yearly correspondence with a sympathetic Morpeth florist, make touching reading. Held at the Women’s Library @ LSE, they complement iconic items associated with Emily Wilding Davison, including the purse that was in her pocket when she was struck by the King’s horse and many of her manuscripts. Kept by Rose Lamartine Yates, these were donated in the 1980s by her daughter-in-law. As, in this centenary year of her death, Emily Wilding Davison is now being honoured, we should also remember the friends who did so much to preserve a record of her ideals and of her life.

Elizabeth Crawford

Further reading :

Biographies of Emily Wilding Davison, Mary Leigh and Rose Lamartine Yates may be found in Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement 1866-1928: a reference guide, London, 1999.
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: a regional survey, London, 2005
Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women: the Garretts and their circle, London, 2002
Elizabeth Crawford, Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, London, 2013

LSE Emily Wilding Davison Centenary online exhibition

Woman and her sphere

The British Library's new exhibition opens today: Propaganda: Power and Persuasion.  To mark this we have a story about political propaganda used by the Government of India to attack Gandhi's policy.

In June 1942, with the Second World War raging, and the Japanese occupying Burma, the Government of India was aware that Gandhi was planning a new civil disobedience movement. The India Office Records has a file from this period which contains a telegram that gives a fascinating insight into the planning of a propaganda campaign by Government. The telegram is from the Government of India, Home Department, to the Secretary of State for India, dated 7 June 1942, regarding Gandhi’s motivations and what action should be taken by Government in preparation for any possible mass protest movement.

Anti-British poster, c.1942, entitled ‘Britain’s Second Front’. IOPP/Mss Eur C659

The writer of the telegram admits that the Government of India has no definite information on what form the movement would take or what support Gandhi will get. It was also admitted that any early Government intervention would risk stiffening Gandhi’s resolve and rally waverers to his cause. Yet it was advised that Government should be prepared: “… we must have our plans ready and one matter that we consider of prime importance is that public opinion in England and even more in America should be prepared well in advance for any strong action we may eventually decide to take. We suggest that Press in England and important American correspondents should be taken into our confidence with object of exposing Gandhi and the Indian National Congress”.

The telegram outlines a possible campaign to counter any protest movement:

• An official paper on Congress policy based on published and secret documents should be supplied to the American Government
• A popular pamphlet based on published material should be prepared
• Development of the theme of Congress using the War opportunistically to attempt to obtain political concessions, and their opposition to the War and willingness to obtain their long term object through Japan if it could not be obtained from England.

Gandhi standing beside Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, 1946. Photo 134/2(19)

The point is made in the telegram that Gandhi should not be personally attacked, only his policy. Emphasis was to be made on the danger to American war efforts and to the safety of American troops in India which could result from Gandhi’s plans. Efforts were also to be made to dispel any American suggestion that an Indian protest movement would compel the British Government to make fresh political concessions.

On 8 August 1942, the mass protest campaign known as the Quit India Movement was launched. The Government did indeed take strong action, moving swiftly to make mass arrests, including Gandhi and the Congress leadership who would be imprisoned for the rest of the War, and employing British troops to suppress the resulting outbreaks of violence.

John O’Brien
Post 1858 India Office Records   


Further reading:
India Office Political Department, File 4983/1942 Congress and the War, July-September 1942 [IOR/L/PJ/7/5405]

A resource for researchers in modern South Asian history which is perhaps under-utilised is our collection of oral history interviews with people recounting their memories of the region. We have more than 200 in all, including those from the BBC series 'Plain Tales from the Raj'.

My own contribution to the development of this collection is at one remove. Within 18 months of my joining what was then known as the India Office Library and Records, not only had I met three persons with personal experience of life in the latter days of the Raj, I had also succeeded in persuading them to record their reminiscences for posterity.

I remember meeting Frank Willcocks in the summer of 1988 during a Historical Association conference in Plymouth in Devon to mark the 400th anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. For him it was an opportunity to return to the city of his birth. His connection with India had come in the years just after the end of the Second World War, when he had been posted to the East for his national service with the Royal Air Force. Curiously, one lasting effect of the two years he spent outside the U.K. was a lifelong interest in amateur dramatics, a pastime into which he had thrown himself with gusto in an effort to relieve the tedium of life on station. One particular anecdote I recall him telling me was the occasion sometime in the spring of 1947 when he found himself performing in an up-country location in front of an all-male audience, most of whose members had not laid eyes on a European woman for several months. Almost inevitably this meant that when the first female member of the cast went on stage she was greeted with a huge testosterone-fuelled roar; the poor girl dried immediately and the production came to a grinding halt! I hope this made it on to the tape of the interview! 

  
 
Photograph of the port at Rangoon from the Curzon Collection Online Gallery

The other interviewee I remember was Geraldine Wright, a delightful Anglo-Burmese lady I had the pleasure of meeting during a holiday in Worcestershire in the late 1980s. Her story was a much more serious one. Born and brought up in Rangoon, she and her family had had to leave the country hurriedly early in 1942 to escape the invading Japanese army. During the doubtless frightening journey overland to the relative safety of Chittagong in Bengal in India she had been bitten by a stray dog, and consequently at the tender age of nine had endured a series of horrendous injections through the stomach wall to ensure that she did not contract rabies. The story did end happily in that she, her parents and brother all managed to escape unscathed, and indeed the tape concludes with her memories of the return visit she made to Rangoon in 1977 and her noting what had and had not changed since she was last there.  

Hedley Sutton

Asian and African Studies Reference Team Leader 

The interviews with Frank Willcocks and Geraldine Blanche Wright can be found via the Sound & Moving Image Catalogue.