Untold lives blog

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

Today we have a guest blogger, author Bijan Omrani.  Read on to discover the part that treacle pudding has played in Anglo-Afghan relations!

The many western entrepreneurs who, over the last ten years, have been drawn to do business in Afghanistan are by no means pioneers. Records in the British Library describe the first wave of western business travellers who reached Kabul well over a century ago.

Amir Abdur Rahman condemning Hazara prisoners of war to death © UIG/The British Library Board  Images Online

In 1880, after the Second Afghan War, Amir Abdur Rahman – the “Iron Amir” – came to the Afghan throne.  Determined to reunify a fragmented country, he ruthlessly imposed a regime of conscription. He intended to develop a large modern army as an instrument to impose central control throughout Afghanistan.  Realising that this new army needed large amounts of military materiel, he was eager to establish up-to-date factories in Kabul to supply it. Lacking the necessary expertise in Kabul, he turned to Europe for help. In 1887, a British engineer, Salter Pyne, was appointed to construct the Amir’s mashin khaneh, or workshop complex. The steam-powered workshop soon began to turn out rifles, artillery and ammunition, and later boots, soap, carpets, blankets, needles, paper, agricultural gear, and even musical instruments for military bands.

Over the following 20 years, Salter Pyne was followed to Kabul by over a dozen western specialists, many hoping to make their fortunes in Afghanistan. There were experts in mining, munitions, geology, tanning, and even a piano tuner. Many of them vividly describe the difficulties of developing western-style industry in Afghanistan. All of the factories were under the close supervision of the Amir, who retained control of pay and often press-ganged poor Afghans into work. The workforce was chronically underpaid, demotivated, and frequently resorted to corruption and petty theft just to survive. The Amir responded with floggings and executions, and the western managers with punishments not much less harsh. These conditions frequently generated resentment against the European outsiders, exacerbated by memories of the recent Second Afghan War. Sabotage was a regular occurrence. Nails were put in machines, glue substituted for lubricating oil in valves, and even flint mixed into a gunpowder grinding machine – Frank Martin, Pyne’s successor from 1895, realised the danger just in time.

Amir Habibullah © UIG/The British Library Board Images Online

Although life in Kabul for these westerners could be tense, there were frequent moments of light relief combined with important cultural diplomacy. Annie Thornton, the wife of Ernest Thornton who ran the state tanneries in Kabul for periods between 1893-1909, organised a tamasha, or entertainment, for their Afghan workforce in their Kabul garden, combining an Afghan pilau with games from an English village fete such as sack racing and pillow fights. Whilst her husband was at the tannery, Annie spent time in the court of the Amir Habibullah, Abdur Rahman’s successor, a passionate gardener and gourmand. The Amir shared his horticultural interests with her; she is credited with introducing the daffodil to Kabul in 1908. She also taught his chefs a number of English recipes, amongst which treacle pudding became his favourite. It is said that Habibullah kept Afghanistan out of the First World War because of his good sense and political wisdom, but I wonder whether it was really his fondness for Annie Thornton’s English cooking which saved the British Empire from fighting on a second front.

Bijan Omrani

Further Reading:
IOR/L/PS/11/31 and 11/38, Interviews of British commercial travellers with political agents
IOPP/Mss Eur F111/56 Lord Curzon’s diary of a trip to Kabul in 1894
“Making Money in Afghanistan: The first Western Entrepreneurs 1880-1919”, Bijan Omrani, Asian Affairs Journal, vol. 43 no 3, November 2012.

In September 1804, John Reeves, the head of the Aliens Office responsible for foreigners within Britain approached the Home Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury seeking direction on an unusual problem. Nine Chinese sailors had been employed by the Königlich Preußische Asiatische Compagnie in Emden nach Canton und China on board one of their ships from Canton to Emden. On their arrival they were discharged from the vessel and unsuccessfully attempted to find an outward bound vessel for China.

View of Emden from the sea, 1845 ©De Agostini/The British Library Board  Images Online

Stranded in Europe during the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars, the Chinese men made their way to England in the hope of obtaining employment on an outward bound East Indiaman to Canton. However arriving at Gravesend, the East India Company’s Agent for the Indian mariners employed on the ships refused to take charge of them and the nine sailors consequently fell under the cognisance of the Aliens Office as refugees. With no resources to get them home, the Home Secretary recommended that John Reeves seek assistance from the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India, the government department then responsible for overseeing the East India Company’s territorial, revenue, military and political activities in India.

The President of the Board, Viscount Castlereagh, took the case up, instructing the Board’s Secretary to approach the Company and suggest that the men should be provided with support in returning home. As the British Government was also keen on establishing formal diplomatic relations with the Emperor of China in this period, Castlereagh also recommended that the case “should be fully stated to the Chinese Government in order that they may justly appreciate the attention which the British East India Company pay to subjects of the Chinese Empire who have sought asylum in England after being abandoned by States in whose employment they have been drawn from their Native Country.” The Directors referred the case to their Committee of Shipping but as these records don’t survive it is not possible to find out what happened.  

Richard Scott Morel
Curator, East India Company Records

Further reading:
IOR/E/2/30 pp. 216-217: Letter from George Holford in Whitehall to William Ramsay, 9 Oct 1804.
IOR/F/1/3 pp. 43-44: Minutes of the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India, 9 Oct 1804.
IOR/B/139 pp. 869-870: Minutes of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, 10 Oct 1804.

Many peoples from across the globe fought in the trenches during the First World War, and one of the largest groups were South Asians of the British Indian Army. Some 1.5 million soldiers and non-combatants from the subcontinent served alongside the British on the Western Front in Northern France and Belgium, the Middle East, East Africa and Gallipoli. For the first time Indian Army contingents were deployed in a European war, and this marked an important watershed. Wounded soldiers were cared for in special hospitals on Britain’s southern coast, including the Brighton Royal Pavilion, built in an oriental style for George IV. The War Office went to great lengths to ensure that the facilities on the front and in the hospitals respected their religious and caste sensibilities, though these concerns disguised some of the ingrained racism they experienced.

The Indian Army arrived in Europe initially with two infantry divisions to shore up the British Expeditionary Force which had been decimated in the first weeks of the war. Ill equipped for trench and increasingly mechanised warfare, some 7,700 Indian Army soldiers lost their lives on the Western Front alone. South Asians fought in many of the major battles of the First World War, including Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert and Loos. The Indian Army suffered some of its heaviest casualties at Neuve Chapelle – some 4,700 men – and the war memorial to Indian soldiers is located in this Northern French town.

English and Indian soldiers of the Signal Troop of the Lucknow Cavalry Brigade relaxing in a farmyard at Brigade Headquarters, 28 July 1915, Photo 24/(158)

Translated excerpts of the censored mails in the India Office Records, housed at the British Library, are an important account of South Asian soldiers’ involvement in the war and document their fears, concerns and harrowing experiences.  For example, Khan Muhammad, 40th Pathans, Brighton Hospital, writes to Niyaz Ali 74th Punjabis, Hong Kong (Urdu, 17/05/1915):
“And there is an expenditure, too great for words, in this country, of black and red pepper (i.e. Hindustani and British troops). You are wise and for the rest you will reply without fail to this letter. […] The black pepper which has come from India has all been used up, and to carry on with I will (i.e., they will) now send for more men, otherwise there would be very little red pepper remaining, because the black is hard and there is plenty of it. And the black pepper (here) is somewhat less than the red, and this water is not right without black pepper. Now you must understand, and what you can see with the eye, is written; you must multiply it all by 45.”

Aware of censorship, a soldier would often use coded or euphemistic language. Here he conveys his shock at the large number of casualties, which led him (and many others) to believe that they were used as ‘cannon fodder’.

 
Extract from Papers of Sir Walter Lawrence, Indian Civil Service, Punjab 1879-95, Private Secretary to Viceroy 1899-1903, Commissioner for sick and wounded Indian soldiers in France and England 1914-16, IOPP/Mss Eur F143/83

At the end of 1915 the majority of Indian contingents were redeployed to the Middle East, but two Indian cavalry divisions remained and would participate in the Battle of the Somme. South Asian soldiers won many awards for bravery, a total of 12,908, including eleven Victoria Crosses.

Florian Stadtler


Discover more about South Asian experiences and contributions in two world wars.

To read the censored mails, visit the Asian and African Studies reading room at the British Library and look at the India Office Records, IOR/L/MIL/5/825-828.

Dr Florian Stadtler is a research fellow at The Open University, and has been working in partnership with the British Library on the OU-led AHRC-funded projects ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad’ and ‘Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections’.

New! Digitised India Office Records First World War files now available via the Europeana website.

The charismatic Sir Victor Sassoon was heir to a great fortune of a banking dynasty which originated from Iraq and later expanded from Bagdad to Bombay and Shanghai.  Like the Rothschild family, the Sassoons moved their headquarters to London in the 19th century and within a few decades they became members of the British establishment.

 Portraits of Sassoon and his wife inside his former residence

Sir Victor, however, decided to spend the second half of his life in Asia.  In the 1920s, he had several titles to his name: Chairman of E.D. Sassoon Banking Co. Ltd; Member of the Indian Legislative Assembly; and Member of Royal Commission for Investigation of Labour Conditions in India.  Apparently his official position conflicted sometimes with his private interests.  As a result, he ran into some trouble with the tax collectors in India and he decided to transfer the bulk of his capital to Shanghai.

 
 Former residence of Victor Sassoon in Peace Hotel, Shanghai (or Cathay Hotel)

Shanghai in the 1930s was a thriving commercial centre and a “tax haven” for Western adventurers.  Sassoon came to cosmopolitan Shanghai as a serious investor in real estate with an estimated capital of around (US) $85 million.  In less than a decade, Sassoon transformed the face of the city with a series of luxury hotels and apartment buildings which are to this day still the most important landmarks of Shanghai. 

Despite his huge commercial success and his privileged life, Sassoon was a worried man.  His busy social life with numerous lady friends hid a deep-seated anxiety because he was a stateless person living at the mercy of a foreign land.  The impending possibility of war and widespread anti-Semitism dashed his hopes of returning to Europe.  In Asia, the Japanese threatened to take over all of China and to establish a Pan-Asia-Pacific empire.  As far as Sassoon was concerned, the only option was to protract his stay in Shanghai as long as it remained in a state of anarchy.  Fans of J. G. Ballard may remember the scene of 1930’s Shanghai in his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun.  The British were seized with panic when Japanese invaded the city.

IOPP/Mss Eur E312/4, f.69
Letter from Sassoon to Yvonne FitzRoy dated Shanghai 3 May 1939

From his letters to Yvonne FitzRoy in the 1930s, Sassoon emerges as an intermediary between Britain and Japan, although he had no official title at that time.  In one letter he laughed off the rumour that he was involved in arranging secret loans to the Japanese government for the development of northern China as a defence against Russia.  In a memorandum written in 1939, however, Sassoon portrays himself as a shrewd operator engaged in direct talk with the Japanese Emperor, Finance Minister, and other important members of the National Diet (the Japanese Parliament), proposing to turn a district of Shanghai into a Japanese settlement.  In order to ensure the extraterritorial rights of other foreign settlers in Shanghai, he had to sell part of China to the Japanese without the consent of the Chinese government. That revelation may come as a shock to the people of Shanghai, who always considered Sassoon as their trusted friend. 

Sassoon eventually left Shanghai in 1948 before the communist takeover of China.  He transferred his assets (except real estate) to the Bahamas.  Wary of the scourge of anti-Semitism, he converted to Buddhism and devoted his later years to philanthropy.

Xiao Wei Bond
Curator, India Office Private Papers