Untold lives blog

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.

Mangoes, papayas, passion fruit, bananas, coconuts, durian… the first things come to mind when someone mentions “jungle trees”.  The British consume fruits imported from other parts of the world knowing that they cannot grow in the Northern European climate.  But our knowledge of tropical fruits stops short at their succulent taste and nutritional values.  It rarely occurs to us to consider how indigenous people forage for food in the rain forest and take advantage of jungle trees in their daily life. 

A recently acquired booklet came to our attention: Some Jungle Trees and their uses, printed in 1944 by the British Southern Army under the order of Lt-Gen Sir Noel Beresford-Peirse during the campaigns of Pacific War against the Japanese invasion of South East Asia.

IOPP/Mss Eur F670/2 

The handbook was intended for European soldiers and airmen if they were stranded in Asian jungles, as an instruction manual on how to identify different species of tropical trees and plants native to South and South East Asia, and how to make use of them as survival aids.  The compiler of the book must have drawn much of the information and wisdom from the local inhabitants knew how to utilise the trees to find food, build shelters, make tools, construct vessels and design traps to hunt animals.  

With illustrations and diagrams, the book describes various species of trees pointing out the “Useful Products”, and enumerating the beneficial and harmful parts of each tree.  It also offers tips on how to improvise in emergency situations.

IOPP/Mss Eur F670/2 

One interesting example is how locals trap fish with semi-toxic seeds of particular plants.  For example, Millettia tree, alias the Moulmein Rosewood, found in Assam, Burma, and the Malay Peninsula, has these Useful Products: “the seeds of Millettia Pachcarpa can be used to intoxicate fish.  They are thrown into tanks or dammed up streams. The fish, after about two hours, are intoxicated and float unconscious upon the surface of the water, and are thus easily captured, and on recovery serve as useful food.”

Other useful tips include how to extract oil or wax from some nuts and seeds to make candles; how to find trees of which the bark or fruit yield dyes that can be used for camouflage; how to obtain water from tree trunk; how to improvise trapping devices and protection shields with thorny stems of creepers; how to make rope and cordage with the tough fibre in the inner bark; how to turn pulp of unripe fruit into gum in place of tar for sealing the seams of boat; how to identify hard wood and soft wood trees, as the former is excellent material for making cutting weapons, frameworks of rafts or jungle huts, and the pulp of soft wood makes good pillow stuffing, excellent insulation material and padding splints for broken limbs.

IOPP/Mss Eur F670/2 

The book also lists medicinal values of some plants, for example, the black pulp from the seed pod of Cassia Fistula (Indian Laburnam) is listed as a “good laxative, but an excessive amount should not be taken.”


Xiao Wei Bond
Curator, India Office Private Papers   

After writing about Iwan Bazylewski, Bronislaw Boguszewicz and Tatiana Czynnowa in earlier posts on Untold Lives, I came by chance across documents relating to ‘Aliens’ containing lists of names from various internment camps including Dehra Dun, Satara, and Purandhar. Here is what I have discovered…

Iwan Bazylewski spent seven years interned at Dehra Dun He was treated as a serious threat as he had a history of anti-Soviet political activities and had spent few years in a concentration camp. In 1942 Bazylewski decided to join the communist Red Army to fight against Germany but was turned down by the Soviet military attaché.

Image of soldier from Soviet poster: "For the fatherland, For Stalin...".  ©Lessing Archive/British Library Board Images Online

The Government of India decided to release Bazylewski if he could find a job. In October 1944, he was found unsuitable for employment under the military authorities. He was still trying to secure work in 1946. The Russians applied to the India Office for his repatriation, but he could not be forced to go back as he was not subject to the Yalta Agreement. An attempt to push him over to the International Refugees Organisation failed and Bazylewski arrived in the UK on S.S. Strathmore on 3 November 1947.  Robert Niven Gilchrist from the India Office was not happy about the outcome, but he could at least pass the case onto the Home Office.  Neither the Russians nor Poles wanted to take poor Bazylewski and after pushing him between the Northland House in Southampton, the National Service Hostel in Hyde Park, and Brixton Prison, he was finally placed in employment in the summer of 1948.

Bronislaw Boguszewicz was initially released in 1941, but he also found himself in Dehra Dun’s internment camp ‘because he was unfriendly to the Polish authorities’. Boguszewicz did not wish to return to Poland.  He appears on a number of lists of internees and is mentioned in the documents relating to the ‘removal of aliens’ after the World War II. Boguszewicz was passed onto the International Refugee Organisation for resettlement, but was excluded from repatriation. The India Office files do not give any details of his whereabouts after the war, but I have come across a website of a Polish film consultant, who worked on The Way Back. The film was based on Slavomir Rawicz’s book The Long Walk which claimed to tell the true story of an escape from the Soviet Union to India. Apparently Boguszewicz recognised some characters in the book although it certainly was not his story as he escaped through Persia, not the Himalayas. Perhaps he met some of the people in the camps?

Tatiana Czynnowa is my favourite adventurer, full of life and imagination, a tough woman fearing nothing and risking everything. She too ended up in the internment camp and was then was placed in the parole centre in Purandhar. She claimed to be a nurse, born in ‘Kaftan Tatar’.  She was subsequently moved to Satara. She gave birth to a baby girl in 1942 and evidence suggests that they were both released in October 1943. Here the trail ends and at present her subsequent story remains untold.  Can you complete it for us?

Dorota Walker
Reference Specialist, Asian and African Studies

Further reading:
Read Part 1 & Part 2 of The Great Escape
IOR/L/PJ/8/31, 35, 37 , 38

A recent readers’ event at the BL focussed on how the India Office Records are being used by researchers from East India Company at Home 1757-1857, Making Britain 1870-1950, and Beyond the Frame - Indian British Connections. These projects look that the impact that India has had on Britain and have uncovered the kinds of records that are the lifeblood of this blog.

The session was chaired by Professor Susheila Nasta of The Open University. Dr Kate Smith explained how East India Company at Home is rethinking the British country house in its imperial and global aspects.  Company officials and their families are being tracked on their return to the UK. Asian furniture, furnishings and ornaments in their homes were seen by visitors as well as by family and servants – what did these objects mean to the British, and was their placement in a particular part of the house significant?

The human aspect is an important thread in research for the project. Kate gave examples from two rich sources of family papers found in the India Office Private Papers. Letters reveal how difficult a decision it was for Lord Amherst  to accept the post of Governor General in 1822. Lady Amherst’s diary of her journey to India compares places visited on the voyage to those she had left behind in England. The Walsh letters show the movement of family members back and forth between Asia and Britain, and give voice to the pining for UK country houses which gave a sense of belonging whilst living thousands of miles away.

European lady and her family, attended by an ayah. From The costume and customs of modern India (London, c.1824) Images Online 

Dr Florian Stadtler, a guest blogger for Untold Lives, talked about Making Britain and Beyond the Frame. These interlinked projects highlight the contribution made by South Asians to key events in British history and the impact they made on British culture.  A wide variety of individuals is featured:  lascar seamen; the first Asian MPs; ayahs; suffragette Princess Sophia Duleep Singh; Krishna Menon and the India League. Florian picked out the Public and Judicial Department record series (IOR/L/PJ) as being particularly useful for his research.

Florian then explained how he had managed to uncover at the BL previously overlooked information about the role of Indian soldiers in the First and Second World Wars - photographs, official documents, private letters. Making Britain and Beyond the Frame aim to break the silence on subjects like this, providing databases and digitised records to encourage people to go to look at the archives themselves.

Susheila commented that archives are a fantastic source for story-telling and that novelists should take note of this.  We hope that the Untold Lives blog can play a part in opening up the India Office Records to a wider public.  By sharing stories we have found, we aim to lure people to the BL to make their own discoveries with the help of expert and friendly staff!

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records



Further reading:
Amherst Papers IOPP/Mss Eur F140
Walsh Papers IOPP/MSS Eur D546
The Indian Comforts Fund
The Indian sepoy in the trenches
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh
Digitised records  from the India Office Records – BL Digitised Manuscripts   Europeana 

If you have questions about the India Office Records, please email [email protected].

Bradford City’s visit to Wembley for the Capital One Cup final on 24 February has attracted worldwide media coverage and public interest, but many are surprised to learn this is not the club's first appearance in a major cup final. City, currently lying mid-table in League 2, won the FA Cup in 1911 beating Newcastle United 1-0 in a replay held at Old Trafford after the first match at Crystal Palace ended 0-0. City’s cup winning team included eight Scotsmen, still a record for an FA Cup final, among them Jimmy Speirs who was their inspirational captain. It was Speirs who scored the winning goal after 15 minutes, when his header crept into the net after confusion in the Newcastle goalmouth. After the game Speirs held aloft the new (current) FA Cup which coincidentally had been made in Bradford by the jewellery firm Fattorini & Sons.

James Hamilton Speirs was born in Glasgow in 1886. At the age of 19 he joined Glasgow Rangers and then Clyde before moving south to sign for Bradford City in July 1909, making his debut against Manchester United on 1st September. Speirs was described as ‘a cultured and scheming inside-right’ who averaged a goal every two games during his Scottish career. In March 1908 Speirs won his only international cap for Scotland in a match against Wales. At City he played 86 League games scoring 29 times before moving to Leeds City (United) in December 1912 for a then huge fee of £1400. After a further 73 League games and 32 goals, Speirs played his last match in the final game of the 1914-15 season. Despite being married with two young children, he returned to Glasgow and volunteered to join the Cameron Highlanders and enlisted on 17 May 1915. Conscription was still over a year away and even then he would have been exempt through being married with a young family. In March 1916 Corporal Speirs was posted to France. He won the Military Medal for bravery in May 1917 during the Second Battle of Arras, though unfortunately the citation has not survived, and was then promoted to Sergeant. Later that year on 20 August during the Battle Passchendaele, Speirs was reported wounded and missing, with his widow eventually being informed that he had died on or shortly after that date.

Jimmy Speirs is buried at Dochy Farm New British Cemetery near Ypres in Belgium. The grave has received a new headstone and for the first time in 90 years his name is spelt correctly. It had been spelt Spiers, an error that had been made on his enrolment form when he first joined the army. Looking back as a City fan it is sad to learn of a man who had died a lonely death in a muddy shell-hole just six years after holding-up the FA Cup in front of thousands of cheering Bradfordians.

John Watmough
Copy Cataloguing Team

Further reading:

Frost, T. Bradford City: a complete record 1903-1988 (Derby, Breedon, 1988)
Markham, D.  The legends of Bradford City (Derby, Breedon, 2007)
City Gent Magazine (fanzine) 2009 (158) Sept. p.29 and 2011 (172) Aug. p.6

See Explore the British Library for catalogue records.

Jimmy Speirs’ dedicated website: http://www.jimmy-speirs.co.uk/4901.html

Bantams Past Museum: http://www.bantamspast.co.uk/frontroom/jimmy_speirs.html

Photograph from Google images