Untold lives blog

Indian seamen, or lascars, remain forgotten heroes of the world wars, partly because information about them is very scarce. The blog I posted earlier today details the death toll, the numbers of men taken prisoner and acts of bravery and selflessness in circumstances of extreme danger. We thought it appropriate to remember the Indian seamen commended for their bravery and devotion to duty by publishing their names recorded in an India Office Records file (IOR/L/E/8/2909).

Image of Head Lascar
Photo 472/25 (110)

Documents from the India Office Records file, below

 In the file, details of the individual reasons for their award are detailed down the right hand side of the pages above. Unfortunately, these flimsy papers with their slightly smudgy text are too wide to be photographed in their entirety and remain legible in this blog. The original file may be consulted in the Asian and African reading room at the British Library once you have obtained a reader's pass.

Penny Brook
Head of India Office Records

Further reading

Rozina Visram Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (Pluto, 2002)

IOR/L/E/8/2909 E&O 5216/45 - Preparation of a Brochure on the War Effort of Indian Seamen, 1945

Making Britain database

Asians in Britain learning resource

Images

Seamen from South Asia, known as lascars, played a vital role during both world wars, providing manpower to keep the supply lines open. However, their bravery and commitment, in often terrifying situations, have been largely overlooked, even though thousands paid the ultimate price. During the First World War 3,427 lascars lost their lives and 1,200 were taken prisoner. It is thought that around 6,600 died during the Second World War, 1,022 were wounded, many severely, and 1,217 became prisoners of war. Pioneering historians such as Rozina Visram have highlighted the importance of their role and the extent of their sacrifice, but until now, relatively little has been known about the stories of individual lascars. The India Office Records team was therefore delighted to find this modest-looking file, dated 1945.

A note inside the file states ‘We’ve very little information about Indian Seamen. The attached represents all there is.’

  According to a further note ‘Indian seamen served in all the Seven Seas throughout the war. They took part in the landing operations in Africa, Italy, France and Burma.’ The file contains five pages listing honours awarded to Indian officers and men for gallantry and devotion to duty, or for long and meritorious service at sea. Honours were awarded for bravery under fire and when ships were torpedoed and sinking, courageous rescues, service to others, leadership and fearless devotion to duty. A further page lists those who received civil commendations for brave conduct or were mentioned in despatches. The images below are taken from the list of honours and give a flavour of the individual acts of courage.

s.s. British Judge
Award: B.E.M. 

m.v. Sutlej
Award: B.E.M. 

s.s. Fort Maisonneuve
Award: B.E.M. 

The slightly fuzzy typescript and flimsy paper in the file seem inadequate as a memorial to such courage, but this record is remarkable for the way it brings together the elusive details of their service.

This story also illuminates the Untold Lives of the staff at the British Library. The importance of the file was spotted by Luke Marriage when he was cataloguing the India Office Economic Department records, so he showed it to colleagues at the India Office Records team meeting and we agreed that we should blog about it. Before he catalogued it, researchers could only have found it by painstakingly searching in the original registers and indexes which would have led them to the rather cryptic catalogue record below.

Thanks to Luke’s work, the new catalogue record includes the brief description below which means that in future, researchers will easily find it in our online catalogue.

We are very pleased that our efforts to improve access to the India Office Records have also enabled us to pay tribute to the courage and fortitude of Indian seamen during the Second World War. At 11-00 am today, we will remember them further by using the Untold Lives blog to post the names of all those listed in the file. 

Penny Brook and Luke Marriage
India Office Records

Further reading

Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (Pluto, 2002)

IOR/L/E/8/2909

Making Britain database

Asians in Britain learning resource

Images:      

On this day 100 years ago the German Navy authorised a bombing raid on London using five Zeppelins. This was not the first raid which had been carried out against Great Britain. The first bombs fell on the night of the 19-20 January 1915 over Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and King’s Lynn. The first raid on London occurred on 31 May 1915. The Zeppelins gained the name ‘Baby-killers’ after the death of three year old Elsie Leggett in her home in Stoke Newington.

It was during the First World War that Germany became the first nation to conduct aerial bombings against Great Britain. These were carried out in airships, which were long cylindrical rigid structures filled with gas. The first type of airship constructed was called a Zeppelin after its inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and these were the main type of airship used during the First World War. 

The German Zeppelin LZ 18 (L 2) at Berlin-Johannistal. Image source: Weltrundschau zu Reclams Universum 1913, Wikimedia Commons

On 13 October 1915 the Zeppelins appeared over the Norfolk coast at 18:30 but only one made it to London. This Zeppelin known as L 15 proceeded to bomb the area around Charing Cross including the Lyceum Theatre. 17 people were killed in this attack and 20 injured. The other Zeppelins, which did not make it to London, bombed Woolwich, Guildford, Tonbridge, Croydon, Hertford and an army camp near Folkestone. A total of 71 people were killed and 128 injured.

The Zeppelin bombings in London were witnessed by many of its residents including the boys of Princeton Street Elementary School. In the aftermath of the bombing raid of 13 October and a previous raid on 8 September the boys recorded their experiences of the bombings in two volumes now held at the British Library. In the accounts most of the boys were getting ready for bed, running errands or playing out on the street when the Zeppelins arrived, which suggests that Londoners had no prior warning of the attacks. The boys expressed both excitement and fear at the sight of the air ships and most went out to inspect the damage once they had left.

R. Beasley records how he was on his way to collect a parcel from his father when he saw a bomb explode near the Lyceum Theatre. He recalls how the man next to him had his arm blown off before he ran into the Theatre to seek shelter. Beasley goes on to reveal how his father was one of the injured in the blast and was taken to Charing Cross Hospital. 

Holborn schoolboys's impressions of Zeppelin Raids over London, Add MS 39528 f.2. 

E. Brown was asleep when the bombs started falling but was woken up by ‘a reverberating roar, like lions’. He got up to see what was happening and went downstairs where he caught sight of the Zeppelin. On seeing the guns firing at the Zeppelin, Brown headed for a closer look. The following morning he was annoyed that the Zeppelins had caused him to lose ‘3 hours of my sleep’ as well as the damage to the local area and Beasley’s father.

Holborn schoolboy's' impressions of Zeppelin Raids over London, Add MS 39528 f.4. 

The Zeppelin raids across Britain continued until 5 August 1918. During the course of the war British air defences improved and a number of Zeppelins were shot down. The photograph below shows the hull of L 33, which was damaged by an anti-aircraft shell and by night fighters. The Zeppelin was forced to land in Essex as the Captain judged that it would not have survived the flight across the North Sea. There were no fatalities. 

 India Office Official Record of the Great War - 'The wrecked Zeppelin brought down by our aviators near the coast of Essex. The skeleton of an airship which crashed in a field. 1915'. Photo 21

Laura Walker
Lead Curator, Modern Archives & Manuscripts 1851-1950

Further reading:
More information on the Zeppelin raids. The full accounts by R. Beasley and E. Brown can be found on The Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website.

On 26 September 1914, 28,500 Indian Army troops arrived on the Western Front to fill the huge losses suffered by the British Expeditionary Force. They arrived in the nick of time and played a vital part in the campaign.  Today we share letters written by Indian soldiers exactly one year later. 

 
Photo 24/294

Untold Lives has previously featured extracts of letters from Indian soldiers fighting in France during the First World War. A common topic of their letters was news from the other theatres of conflict in the war, and requests for information from family and friends in India.

On 26 September 1915, Alladitta and Mustafa, Gunners with the Meerut Divisional train, No.7, wrote to Nathu Khan, stationed at Jhelum in India, giving news of the war: “As to what you wrote asking who has won the victory in Africa, the fact is that the English are fighting in Africa, and here too, and everywhere against the German Emperor. The Sultan of Turkey, who is the sovereign of the Musalmans, is helping the German Emperor, and is fighting the English steadily. He is fighting the English Army in the neighbourhood of the city Basra. As to what you say that there is no fighting going on in France, whoever told you so is lying. The fighting is going on with great vigour and thousands of mothers’ sons perish daily. There does not seem to be any arrangement to bring the war to a decisive issue. The matter is in the hands of God”.

 
IOR/L/MIL/5/825/6, f. 942

“The victory in Africa is described in the newspapers. You have asked me to write about the war. There is no prospect of any decision being arrived yet. There is a strict order against writing about the war. And anyone who does so is severely punished. Our letters are sent in open envelopes which are closed afterwards.”

As this extract shows, the Indian soldiers were well aware that their letters were being censored and some attempted to get around this with codes. On the same day Alladitta and Mustafa were writing to their friend in Jhelum, Mela Singh of the 25th Cavalry wrote from Marseilles to Magar Singh in the Punjab: “We are still in Marseilles. The news of the war is thoroughly bad. Below I write the signs which will give you the news when we go forward (to the front). For our letters are examined.

The signs are as follows:- I The fighting is very mild. II The fighting is moderately severe. III Attacks and counter attacks. IV Heavy losses”.

He also gives various symbols for being ill, a bullet and dead!

IOR/L/MIL/5/825/6, f. 960

It was not the intention of the British Government to hide the fact that the soldiers’ letters were read; it was after all standard military practice. Both these letters were passed by the censor.

John O’Brien
India Office Records 

Further Reading:
Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, Sep 1915-Oct 1915 [IOR/L/MIL/5/825/6, folios 942 and 960] online

The Battle of Loos in north-eastern France in September and October 1915 was an attack by six British divisions as part of ’The Big Push’ by the Allied forces.  Before the infantry was given orders to advance on the morning of 25 September 1915, chlorine gas was released.  This was the first time the British Army had used poison gas in the War. On the first day of the attack 8,500 British soldiers were killed but only 2,000 have a known grave, such was the ferocity of the fighting.

Reverend John Gwynn, chaplain to the Irish Guards, giving the last sacrament to a dying German soldier just before he himself was killed on Hill 70 at the Battle of Loos, October 1915 from The War Illustrated Album deLuxe (London, 1916)  © UIG/The British Library Board Images Online

On the 100th anniversary of the start of the battle we remember two British librarians who died at Loos.

Harold Percival Bevis was born in Paddington in 1891, the son of insurance agent Charles Thomas Bevis and his wife Emily Adelaide.  At the time of the 1911 census, Bevis was living in Willesden with his parents and two of his four siblings, and working as an assistant librarian at Hampstead Library. He enlisted in the Army on 23 September 1914 as a private in the 19th (County of London) Battalion, The London Regiment (St Pancras). The Battalion was a Territorial unit with its headquarters in Camden Town.

Just over a year later, 24 year-old Harold Bevis died on the first day of the Battle of Loos from wounds received in action – a gunshot wound to his shoulder and shrapnel in his right side. He is buried in Noeux-les-Mines Cemetery. The possessions listed in his record of service are a wrist watch, a rosary, an identity disc, and a strap.

Reginald Thomas Mayrick was born in 1895, also in Paddington.  He was one of seven children born to John and Florence Mayrick.  His father worked as a hall porter in a club.  When Florence completed the form for the 1911 census she recorded her 16 year-old son’s name as just Thomas, so perhaps this is how he was known within his family. Soon afterwards Mayrick left Wandsworth School and joined West Hill Public Library as a temporary assistant librarian on a salary of 7s per week.

Mayrick enlisted at Kingston-on-Thames as a private in the 9th Battalion East Surrey Regiment.  He fought at the Battle of Loos and died aged just 20 on 26 September 1915. His name appears on the Loos Memorial which commemorates over 20,000 officers and men who have no known grave.

The names of Harold Percival Bevis and Reginald Thomas Meyrick are inscribed on the memorial at the British Library which honours librarians who lost their lives during the First World War. 

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records

Debates about Britain’s decision to go to war in 1914 typically focus on the actions of its government. We hear less about pressure groups which encouraged preparation for war with Germany. The Imperial Maritime League was one of the noisiest.

Imperial Maritime League. "Wake up England !" Tab.11748.a. poster 180. Images Online 

The league was co-founded in 1908 by Lionel Graham Horton Smith and Harold Wyatt. Both were senior members of the Navy League, but they became disillusioned with its refusal to criticise the Admiralty and Liberal government.

The two men were obsessed with the possibility that Germany might overtake Britain as a naval power. But far from disliking Kaiser Wilhelm II, Wyatt and Horton Smith admired his militarism. Their criticisms were instead directed at British society, for being ignorant about its reliance on the Royal Navy and lacking the resolve to fight rival empires.

 Wyatt believed in the necessity of war for national survival, though he lacked direct experience of the armed forces. Horton Smith, a lawyer, had some experience in the army. He wrote prolifically on the classics and Scottish culture, and deposited a large cache of the league’s surviving documents with the British Library on 21 October 1933.

 
Imperial Maritime League Pamphlet X.631/742  

Over a thousand members of the Navy League departed with Horton Smith and Wyatt to form the Imperial Maritime League, including famous names such as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. It also received support from some right-wing newspapers.

The league made progress in fund raising and organising large-scale petitions and rallies. These demanded increased naval spending and opposed international agreements that curtailed the Royal Navy’s capacity to wage war. Rattled by its upstart rival, the Navy League overhauled its organisation and campaigning, and as a result expanded its membership and political influence. With its thunder stolen, the Imperial Maritime League struggled to appear credible. Journalists mocked its campaigns as irrelevant, extremist and hyperbolic.

Exhausted and demoralised, Wyatt and Horton Smith resigned as joint secretaries in 1913. Wyatt left completely. Horton Smith remained to help the new management. But he became embroiled in petty internal squabbles typical of small extremist organisations. In August 1914, just before war broke out, the league was reduced to promoting its cause to tourists in Devon.

Yet the war supplied a new role for the league and Horton Smith. He headed its ‘Villages and Rural Districts Enlightenment and Recruiting Campaign’, lecturing young men on the necessity of enlisting. And he published a stream of pamphlets justifying the conflict, all deposited at the British Library.

Imperial Maritime League Pamphlets X.631/742

The Imperial Maritime League ceased in 1921, but it had unintentionally helped to revive the Navy League. The latter continues to the present day as the Sea Cadet Corps.

Horton Smith’s campaigning on behalf of the Imperial Maritime League corrects the popular misconception that war with Germany was unexpected in 1914. It also reminds us that sections of British society desired such a conflict, not only to stem the rise of Germany as a world power, but also to ‘improve’ British society.

 Imperial Maritime League Pamphlets X.631/742 

Neil Fleming
Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Worcester

Further reading:
N.C. Fleming, ‘The Imperial Maritime League: British Navalism, Conflict and the Radical Right, c. 1907–1920’, War in History, 23, 3 (2016).

Discover the work of Lionel Graham Horton Smith through Explore the British Library

A blueprint map, housed in a slim file held in the India Office Records, reveals an overlooked and neglected aspect of the First World War.

 Excerpt of a map showing the ‘re-erection yard’ Magil, Basra, 17 February 1919. IOR/L/PS/20/35 f. 56. 

The map is of the village of Magil, on the banks of the Euphrates, near Basra in Mesopotamia (Iraq). The map reveals the plans of the Inland Water Transport (IWT, a branch of the Corps of Royal Engineers) to transform the village into a vast dockyard, capable of building enough vessels to support Britain’s military campaign against the Ottoman armies in Mesopotamia. Amongst the wharves, sidings and workers’ camps there is small patch of land, identified as a Chinese Cemetery. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission states that 227 bodies were interred here; 227 unnamed casualties, who worked for the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC).

The use of Chinese manpower was widespread during the First World War. The British Government recruited nearly 100,000 Chinese labourers to support their frontline troops on the Western Front. As many as 6,000 Chinese were bought to Basra to help construct some 200 steamers, other vessels and pontoons that were shipped in flat-packed form from Britain. These labourers, and the vessels they reconstructed, supported the Indian Expeditionary Force D in Mesopotamia.

Slipway at the Inland Water Transport (IWT) Docks at Magi, 1917. Image credit: Imperial War Museum, Q 24551.

The manpower required for the CLC in Basra was recruited from late 1916 in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. In October 1916 the British Minister at Peking wrote that the General Office Commanding at Singapore was sending for a contractor ‘to recruit indentured Coolies for service in Mesopotamia’. In total, the British transported over 4,000 skilled Chinese mechanics, and over 1,000 unskilled Chinese labourers to Mesopotamia. Xu Guoqi has written that those Chinese labourers sent to the Western Front were ‘thumb-printed and assigned a number’, their only identification, the British regarding their names of being ‘of no importance'. This may explain why those bodies interned in the Chinese cemetery in Basra were never identified.

 The cap badge of the Chinese Labour Corps. Copyright in Flanders Field Museum.  Available as CC BY-NC-SA.

Although some first-hand accounts of life in the CLC on the Western Front survive, precious little about the lives of the Chinese labourers in Basra has been documented. While basic food rations, accommodation and clothing were provided, there was little entertainment beyond the occasional Chinese film shown at the camp cinema. Disease and malnutrition were a problem in Basra’s hot desert climate. The British Medical Journal noted in 1920 that scurvy and beriberi were more prevalent amongst those serving in Mesopotamia than in any other First World War theatre.  

 
Chinese labourers at Boulogne, 12 August 1917. Copyright: Imperial War Museum Q 2695.

The nature of the work was heavy and arduous, and inevitably resulted in fatalities. How prepared or adept the men were for the heavy labour is open to question. The claim (made in 1921 by the Assistant Director of the IWT, Leonard Joseph Hall) that over 4,000 of the Chinese recruits were skilled mechanics, is contradicted by a Mesopotamia Transport Commission report (1918), which stated that the rejection rate for Chinese labourers was very high – as much as 46 per cent. One official described the Chinese labour sent to him as ‘absolutely useless’.  The 227 fatalities suffered amongst the estimated 6,000 Chinese labourers at Basra equates to roughly one death among every 26 members of the Chinese Labour Corps in Mesopotamia.

Mark Hobbs
Subject Specialist, Gulf History Project
British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Further Reading:

‘Report for the Army Council on Mesopotamia. By Sir John P Hewett, GCSI, KBE’ (IOR/L/PS/20/35)

‘Critical Study of the Campaign in Mesopotamia up to April 1917: Part 1 – Report’ (IOR/L/MIL/17/15/72/1)

'Mesopotamian Transport Commission. Report of the Commission Appointed by the Government of India with the Approval of the Right Hon'ble The Secretary of State for India, to Enquire into Questions Connected with the Organisation and Administration of the Railway and River Transport in Mesopotamia' (IOR/L/MIL/17/15/125/1)

Leonard Joseph Hall and Robert Herbert Wilfrid Hughes, The Inland Water Transport in Mesopotamia (London: Constable and Co., 1921)

Matt Leonard, ‘Eastern culture on the Western Front’ World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings

John Starling and Ivor Lee, No Labour, no Battle: Military Labour during the First World War (Stroud: History Press, 2009).

W H Willcox, ‘The Treatment and Management of Diseases due to Deficiency of Diet: Scurvy and Beri-Beri’ The British Medical Journal 3081 (1920), 73-77.

Guoqi Xu, China and the Great War: China's Pursuit of a new National Identity and Internationalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

‘Basra War Cemetery’ Commonwealth War Graves Commission

 Today Untold Lives features another in our series of postings focusing on extracts from letters written by Indian soldiers serving in France, or recovering from their wounds in the Indian hospitals in England.

In his report for the week ending 8 May 1915, the Censor of Indian Mail wrote that “The prevailing topics of correspondence in the letters are, as usual, despondency as to survival owing to the large number of casualties at the front and a keen desire to return to India. A pleasing feature is the mention of the very good hospital arrangements made for the comfort of the troops”.

 
Dome Hospital Brighton, showing some of the 689 beds Photo 24/(1) Images Online 

The truth of the Censor’s comments can clearly be seen in an extract from a letter written by Isar Singh of the 59th Rifles, recovering in the Indian General Hospital, Brighton. On 1 May 1915, he wrote in Gurmukhi to a friend in the 30th Punjabis in India.

“The battle is being carried on very bitterly. In the Lahore Division only 300 men are left. Some are dead, some wounded. The division is finished. Think of it – in taking 50 yards of a German trench 50,000 men are killed. When we attack they direct a terrific fire on us – thousands of men die daily. It looks as if not a single man can remain alive on either side – then (when none is left) there will be peace.”

“When the Germans attack they are killed in the same way. For us men it is a bad state of affairs here. Only those return from the battlefield who are slightly wounded. No one else is carried off. Even Sahibs are not lifted away. The battle ground resounds with cries. So far as is in your power do not come here. If you come, get yourself written down ill of something in Marseilles and say you are weak. You will do better to get the Doctor to write down that sickness you have in the head. Sick men do not come to the war. Here things are in a very bad way. In France the news is that dogs churn the milk in machines and look after the cattle. A man who keeps a dog has to pay 5 rupees a month to the King.”

“Do not be anxious about me. We are very well looked after. White soldiers are always beside our beds – day and night. We get very good food four times a day. We also get milk. Our Hospital is in the place where the King used to have his Throne. Every man is washed once in hot water. The King has given a strict order that no trouble is to be given to any black man in hospital. Men in hospital are tended like flowers, and the King and Queen sometimes come to visit them.”

John O’Brien
India Office Records

Further Reading:
Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, Apr 1915-May 1915 [IOR/L/MIL/5/825/3, folios 318, 337 and 338]- Read online