Untold lives blog

A common sight across the length and breadth of Britain are memorials to those who lost their lives in the First World War. In cities, towns and villages, churches and cathedrals, public squares and gardens, and in public buildings of all kinds, these memorials commemorate the sacrifice made by men and women from all walks of life during that terrible conflict. In 1919, the India Office commissioned its own memorial tablet to commemorate the members of the India Office and the India Store Depot who died for their King and country in the Great War.

Quotes for the cost of the work were sought from three companies, J W Singer & Sons Ltd, Farmer & Brindley Ltd, and Ashby & Horner Ltd, and designs were received from each. A file in the India Office Records contains the correspondence and other papers relating to the memorial, along with examples of the different designs. Proposed designs included a bronze centre panel with Sicilian marble frame (by Singer & Sons) for £250, and a white marble panel with an oak frame (by Ashby & Horner Ltd) for £425.

 
IOR/L/SUR/6/20/49 

The contract was subsequently awarded to Farmer & Brindley Ltd for a design in alabaster and statuary marble at a cost of £316. The contract, dated 24 December 1919, and signed by T Herbert Winney, India Office Surveyor, stipulated that the work was to be completed within 20 weeks of that date. However, a number of points remained to be settled. It was decided on chocolate brown for the colour of the lettering in the inscription, and the date of 1914-19 was chosen (although the Military Department insisted that the Great War had not yet officially ended). These issues, along with amendments to the inscription, caused delays, and by October 1920 the India Office was urging Farmer & Brindley to finish the work in time for Armistice Day. The memorial was officially unveiled by the Marquis of Crewe on the 26 February 1921. It lists the names of 30 members of the India Office who died during the war, and is in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office building in Westminster.

IOR/L/SUR/6/20/49  

In the same file are copies of the India Office Roll of Honour, recording all those who served in the Great War in whatever capacity. Listed in alphabetical order, class distinctions were dissolved. Included equally in the list are messengers, such as C D A Simmons, Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy, and J Teague, Motor Machine Gun Corps, and a Member of the Council of India, Sir T Morison, K.C.I.E., 2nd Lieutenant in the Cambridgeshire Regiment. Also listed is Miss G F C Arnell, who served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment.

Lynn Osborne and John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:

War memorial for members of India Office who died 1914-19 [IOR/L/SUR/6/20/49]

War Memorials Archive

Cityread London, which launched this week, will run throughout April with events in every London borough; aimed to promote reading for pleasure and also to encourage Londoners to contemplate their city’s history.  Each year Cityread London selects a book for the whole capital to read together and for 2014 this is My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young, selected to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One.  Louisa will be speaking about this at a Cityread London event at the British Library on 14 April.

Also as part of the Cityread London event programme, several public libraries are hosting a production by the District 6 Theatre Group, on the role and experience of soldiers of colour in World War One; exploring the contribution made by people of all colours, ethnicities, religious beliefs and nationalities to the British war effort in World War One, whether by serving in the armed forces or providing material and financial resources.  You can see this performance on these dates at the following libraries:

15 April - Richmond Lending Library

22 April - Barking Learning Centre 

24 April – Dagenham Library

28 April – Battersea Library

30 April - Wembley Library

Photo 24/(122) An Indian Cavalry horse hospital in a French factory, 1915. 
 

It is encouraging to hear that Cityread London 2014 events are including these narratives; as non-white non-European experiences of World War One have traditionally been given less media coverage than other aspects of the war.  For researchers interested in this topic, there is a wealth of material in the British Library’s India Office Records with information about the stories of South Asian soldiers serving in the British Indian Army  during World War One; we blogged about some of these stories previously in posts Indian soldiers’ views of England during World War I, An Indian soldier in France during World War I, and The Indian Sepoy in the trenches.  Furthermore last month we wrote about the experiences of Indian Muslims travelling from India to Mecca as part of the Hajj during World War One  in the post Pilgrim traffic during the First World War.

Stella Wisdom
Digital Curator

Further reading 

World War One sources on the British Library website

Every year Indian Muslims undertake the journey from India to Mecca as part of the Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam.  Prior to 1947, the British Indian Government maintained a strong interest in the welfare and safety of pilgrims travelling from India, and regularly received reports from the British Agent at Jeddah on the yearly pilgrimage, copies of which can be found in the India Office Records.

 
The Kabba at Mecca c.1880s (X463 - plate 1) 

The outbreak of hostilities between the British and Ottoman Empires in 1914 raised fears about the impact this would have on the Hajj.  In November 1914, the British Government published an undertaking in the Gazette Extraordinary that the holy places of Arabia and Jeddah would be immune from attack or molestation by the British naval and military forces so long as there was no interference with pilgrims from India.  Similar assurances were given by the Governments of France and Russia.  Despite this, there remained fears for the safety of the pilgrims who would be entering a zone of conflict.  There was also a concern among British officials that foodstuffs and other supplies exported from India for the use of pilgrims in Jeddah would be appropriated by Turkish forces.  The Indian Government had briefly stopped exports of food from India to Jeddah following the seizure of a cargo of food supplies by the Turkish authorities in March 1915.  However reports of distress amongst pilgrims and residents of the holy places had caused the exports to be resumed. 

In the summer of 1915, the Viceroy and the Secretary of State for India exchanged telegrams on the subject of whether to prohibit pilgrimage from India.  The Secretary of State favoured prohibition of pilgrimage for that year, explaining “It is not desirable that large numbers of such [British subjects] should visit enemy country during war.  We can neither protect them nor ensure food supplies. Turks might detain influential men as hostages and would tamper with loyalty of all more effectively than last year”.  However, the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, felt there should no prohibition as it would offend Muslim opinion in India, give an impression of British weakness, and be inconsistent with the British Government’s published undertaking.  It was finally decided to allow pilgrimage from India, but to discourage Indian Muslims from embarking on it.  Assurances were also sought from the Ottoman Government, via the American Government, that food supplies exported from India for the pilgrims would not be diverted to other purposes.

Despite the considerable difficulties, pilgrims continued to travel from India on pilgrimage to Mecca every year throughout the War, although in smaller numbers.  By 1917, the situation had improved enough for Lieutenant Colonel Wilson at the British Agency at Jeddah to write “It may I think be said that, for a War Time Pilgrimage, that of 1917 may be reckoned a great success from every point of view”.

John O’Brien
Post 1858 India Office Records

Further Reading:

Revenue & Statistics Department File 3355/1914, Pilgrim Traffic and the War [IOR/L/E/7/792]

Europeana 1914-1918, a free online resource which brings together original wartime documents, films and stories from 20 countries across Europe.

Previous postings on this blog have mentioned the extracts from the letters of Indian soldiers serving in France during the First World War which are appended to the reports of the Censor of India Mails in France found in the India Office Records.

  Photo 24/1 Dome Hospital in Brighton  Digitised Manuscripts    Images Online

One interesting aspect of the letters is the description of English life by injured Indian soldiers who were recovering from their wounds in the various Indian military hospitals which had been established in Brighton and other parts of the south coast.  Here are some examples from October and November 1915.

A Ali, a storekeeper at one of the Brighton hospitals, wrote to his brother in Lyallpur of a trip he took with his father to London on 1 October.  They visited the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, which he described as absolutely magnificent, and the Zoological Gardens.  He was very impressed with the respect the police commanded, remarking that “If one policeman raises his hand every single person in that direction rich and poor alike, stands still where he is as long as his hand is raised.  There is no need to talk”.  Ali was also impressed with London’s shops, saying that “There is no need of asking as the price is written on everything”.  Ali and his father used the London Underground to get around, and he recalled his excitement: “Then we went in the train that goes under the earth, it was for us a strange and wonderful experience”.

The cost of living was a common topic for letters.  G R Chowam at the Kitchener Indian General Hospital in Brighton wrote that “Unlike India nothing cheap can be purchased here”.  Abdul Said, a Punjabi Muslim, wrote on 1 November to his brother in Jammu , commenting on how expensive the newspapers were.  He attributed this to the fact that “…everyone great and small reads the papers.  Several newspapers come out during the day”.  Like Ali, Abdul Said was impressed by English shops, noting how clean and tidy the butchers' shops were, and how “…every shopkeeper tries especially to keep his shop spick and span and everything is in perfect order”.

  Photo 24/2 Indian soldiers outside the Brighton Pavilion Hospital   Digitised Manuscripts    Images Online

The British weather was often noted by the Indian soldiers.  Abdul Said picked up on the very British custom of starting every conversation by commenting on the weather: “Now the winter has begun and the sun is always hidden.  If by accident it comes out, the day is regarded as we regard the day of Id, and whoever you meet that day will first of all praise the fine day & then go on to whatever else he has to say”.  Desraj at the Pavilion Hospital in Brighton complained that “It rains all the year round”.  One Indian Sub-Assistant Surgeon at Brighton reported that winter had already begun: “Weather is very wet and cloudy and it is raining day and night with few breakages…After 5pm it is so dark that no one could dare to go out of the huts”.

John O’Brien
Post 1858 India Office Records    


Further Reading:

IOR/L/MIL/5/825/7 Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, October to November 1915

The collection of photographs of the Indian Army in Europe during the First World War by H D Girdwood, reference Photo 24, is available to view online

Other Untold Lives postings on the WWI Indian censored letters:

The Indian sepoy in the trenches

Letter from an Indian Soldier in France during World War I

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

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.

On Remembrance Sunday, we are sharing a story about librarians who lost their lives serving in the First World War.

In 1923 The Library Association commissioned the calligraphers Edward Johnston and H Lawrence Christie to design a roll of honour commemorating the British librarians who fell in the Great War.  Johnston, a renowned calligrapher best-known for designing an alphabet used on London Underground signs until 1980, was familiar with the British Museum Library having studied its manuscript collections as a young man.  Christie was one of the co-founders of the Society of Scribes & Illuminators and had already designed other memorials to the 1914-1918 war, including the bronze panel in the House of Commons commemorating the five Committee Clerks who were killed in action.

Letter from H Lawrence Christie to W R B Prideaux, Secretary of the Library Association, showing the 1923 design for the roll of honour

The original design was for a roll of honour on a series of vellum panels behind glass and framed in oak, to be written and gilded by Edward Johnston and H Lawrence Christie, and framed at the Hampshire House Workshops in English Oak.  The Library Association contacted libraries across the United Kingdom asking for information about staff killed during the First World War.  When the replies came in it soon became clear that there were too many names to be easily accommodated by the original design.  Following the advice of Christie, it was decided that the entire memorial would be made of a series of wood panels incised in gilt.  English oak was chosen because, in the words of Christie “the wood seems to be thoroughly British and to symbolise Britain”.  The memorial was made by the workshops of Harry Hems and Sons of Exeter, ecclesiastical sculptor and wood carver.

The memorial, which was erected in the corridor leading to the Round Reading Room of the British Museum, was officially unveiled at a ceremony in Museum on the evening of Friday 24th October 1924.  The memorial remained at the British Museum until 1998 when it was moved to its current site in the British Library.

What is less well-known is that the Library Association also collected service details for each of the librarians named on the memorial.  Many of the forms returned included photographs, which are now held in the British Library Corporate Archive.  A selection of these has been made available on the BL Facebook pages.  More will be added during the coming week.

Unfortunately, we have very little information about the memorial or the librarians mentioned on it, and only have images for 30 of the 142 people named.  Please help us to tell the stories behind these ‘untold lives’ by using this blog or our Facebook gallery pages to share any information you have about the memorial or the librarians named on it.

Lynn Young
British Library Corporate Archivist

A story for Armistice Day...

The India Office Records holds the Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, 1914-1918. The Censor was concerned with letters to and from Indian troops in France and England, and his reports include translated extracts from soldier’s letters. The Government’s fear which led to the censoring of mails was that uncensored letters could provide military information to the enemy and that accounts of Indian soldiers suffering in France could distress their families at home and so lead to political instability in India. Touching, funny, sad and at times bawdy, the letters describe vividly the suffering the Indian soldiers endured and their longing to return to their families back in India.

This letter, originally written in Urdu, was from an Indian Muslim soldier writing from Marseilles, France to Moradabad, United Provinces, dated 14 January 1915. In passing it the Censor, Captain E B Howell, commented in his report that it read like an extract from the Arabian Nights. The soldier writes that he has been in France for a year and a half, but has heard that they will be leaving by the end of January or February at the latest. He says that his family must be very distressed at his long absence, and it reminds him of the following story.

IOR/L/MIL/5/828/1 ff.110-110v

He writes that it is told that the Caliph Hazrat Umar used to make a tour of inspection every night, and that on one occasion he passed near a house where a woman was reading some beautiful verses. The next day he returned to the house and asked the woman what she had been reading. The woman replied that she was reading odes of love and affection to her husband who was absent at the wars. The Caliph returned home and asked his daughter for how long a time a woman could remain continent. The daughter raised her hand and showed three fingers. The Caliph understood that a woman could remain separate from her husband for three months, and he forthwith issued an order that whenever soldiers were sent to the wars they should be returned to their homes every three months.

The Indian soldier concludes by asking the recipient of the letter to pray that his difficulties may be removed and he may soon return safely with honour.

 
John O’Brien
Curator, Post 1858 India Office Records

Discover more documents and books on this subject.