Читать книгу Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914 - Richard Holmes - Страница 17

FOR MOST OF THE PERIOD, British troops – and many British civilians – arriving in India disembarked at Calcutta. Relief at the sight of land was tempered by the fact that safe landing was still some way off, because the Hooghly River estuary, with its shifting sandbanks, was notoriously difficult to navigate. The distinctive James and Mary shoal, near the mouth of the river, was named after a 1690s shipwreck there. Smaller vessels were conned up the river by Hooghly pilots, while larger ones would anchor at the mouth of the river and passengers would be disembarked into tenders for the last leg of the voyage. John Luard’s troop sergeant major summed up his first impressions of India as they made their way upstream, declaring that it was: ‘Hotter than Hades, and a damned sight less interesting.’⁴⁹

William Forbes-Mitchell of the 93rd, diverted to India because of the outbreak of the Mutiny, recalled how:

We had two tug steamers, and the pilot and tug commanders all sent bundles of the latest Calcutta papers on board, from which we learnt the first news of the sieges of Delhi and Lucknow, of the horrible massacre at Cawnpore, and of the gallant advance of the small force under generals Havelock, Neill and Outram for the relief of Lucknow. When passing Garden Reach, every balcony, verandah and housetop was crowded with ladies and gentlemen waving their handkerchiefs and cheering us, all our men being in full Highland dress and the pipes playing on the poop. In passing the present No 46 Garden Reach … we anchored for an hour just opposite … Frank Henderson said to me, ‘Forbes-Mitchell, how would you like to be owner of a palace like that?’ When I, on the spur of the moment without any thought replied, ‘I’ll be master of that house and garden yet before I leave India.’ … Just thirty two years after, I took possession of the house No 46, where I have established the Bon Accord Rope Works.

When his regiment disembarked, Forbes-Mitchell was pleased to see that fellow Scots ‘who had long been exiled from home’ forced beer on the thirsty warriors, ‘and the Highlanders required but little pressing, for the sun was hot, and, to use their own vernacular, the exercise “made them gey an drauthy”’.⁵⁰

Calcutta, the capital of British India until its replacement by New Delhi in 1911, became the liveliest of Indian cities. Captain Alexander Hamilton complained, however, that its origins were unpropitious:

The English settled there about the year 1690 … Mr Job Charnock, then being the Company’s agent in Bengal, had liberty to settle an Emporium in any part of the River’s side below Hughly [Hooghly], and for the sake of a large shady tree chose that place, tho’ he could not have chosen a more unhealthful place on the whole river; for three miles to the North Eastward is a saltwater lake that overflows in September and October and then prodigious numbers of fish resort thither, but in November and December, when the floods are dissipated these fish are left dry and with their putrefaction affect the air with stinking vapours, which the North-East Winds bring with them to Fort William, that they cause a yearly Mortality.

The fort itself, in the most literal sense of one of the key bastions of British rule in India, followed the best principles of artillery fortification:

Fort William was built in a regular Tetraon of brick and mortar called Puckah, which is a composition of brick-dust, Lime Molasses and cut hemp and is as hard and tougher than firm stone or brick, and the town was built without Order as the Builders thought most convenient for their own Affairs, everyone taking in what ground most pleased them for gardening so that in most houses you must pass through a Garden into the House, the English building near the River’s side and the natives within land … About fifty yards from Fort William stands the Church built for the pious charity of Merchants residing there … ⁵¹

Robert Clive described Calcutta as:

One of the most wicked places in the Universe. Corruption, Licentiousness and a want of Principle seem to have possessed the Minds of all Civil Servants, by frequent bad examples they have grown callous, Rapacious and Luxurious beyond Conception. ⁵²

In 1856 Ensign Charles MacGregor remarked that he thought Calcutta was ‘not much of a place. It is all very well if you like balls, and that sort of thing.’⁵³ The capture of the city by Suraj-ud-Daula in 1756 was only a brief check to its rise; Mrs Sherwood recalled:

The splendid sloth and the languid debauchery of European Society in those days – English gentlemen, overwhelmed with the consequences of extravagance, hampered by Hindoo women and by crowds of olive-coloured children, without either the will or the power to leave the shores of India … Great men ride about in state coaches, with a dozen servants running before or behind them to bawl out their titles; and little men lounged in palanquins or drove a chariot for which they had never intended to pay, drawn by horses which they had bullied or cajoled out of the stables of wealthy Baboos.⁵⁴

Minnie Wood was unhappily married to an officer in the Company’s service. She had no idea of the hardships of life in India, and he wrongly thought that he had married an heiress. In 1856 she wrote home to her mother in England:

I do not like Calcutta at all – the smells are awful, indeed I do not see one redeeming quality in the place. The country round is very pretty, but the Indians and their habits are disgusting. It is nothing uncommon to see a man stark naked begging, as do boys who run by the side of our carriage.⁵⁵

Most newly arrived officers were housed in the barracks or in the casemates of Fort William: Henry Havelock found the barracks so crowded in 1823 that subalterns were lodged two to a room. Fred Roberts’s father, commanding the Lahore Division, advised him to put up at a hotel until ordered to report to the Bengal Artillery depot at Dum Dum. He felt lonely because his comrades from the steamer had all gone off to barracks, and:

was still more depressed later on by finding myself at dinner tête à tête with a first-class specimen of the results of an Indian climate. He belonged to my own regiment, and was going home on a medical certificate, but did not look as if he would ever reach England.⁵⁶

He was shocked to find that:

The men were crowded into badly ventilated buildings, and the sanitary arrangements were as deplorable as the state of the water supply. The very efficient scavengers were the large birds of prey called adjutants, and so great was the dependence placed on exertions of these unclean creatures that any injury done to them would be treated as gross misconduct. The natural result of this state of affairs was endemic sickness, and a death-rate of over ten per cent per annum.

Once the East India Company’s rule had extended into Bengal, new arrivals did not stay in Calcutta for long. The Company’s young officers were quickly posted off to learn their trade. Ensign MacGregor went to 40th BNI at Dinapur:

I play rackets and ride, and in fact take an immense lot of exercise. We have got a gymnasium in our compound, and leaping-poles, dumb-bells, &c, besides single-staves and foils. I declare life would be intolerable if it was not for something of that kind. Unless you can do something … India is the slowest place in the world, not even excluding Bognor. However, with all these things I manage to get on very well. Tomorrow I begin those delightful drills. I look forward to them with such joy.⁵⁷

Exercise was welcome, for most travellers had put on weight during the long passage from England, as Lieutenant Bayley of HM’s 52nd Light Infantry wrote of his arrival in 1853:

We used to watch the men at their dinners, and they were so well and plentifully supplied that, in spite of their sea-appetite, many could not get through their rations … and I shall never forget the appearance of the detachment on our arrival in India, when their canvas suits were laid aside, and they tried to button their coatees. Half of them could not be got to meet round the waist.

Soldiers who arrived in Calcutta in drafts were taken by steamer to Chinsurah, the depot for British units serving in Bengal. John Pearman, who reached India in October 1845, recalled how:

We had a parade at 10 am, got white clothing served out, took our sea clearance money, and like soldiers, went off at once to spend it. At night we could not sleep, what with the heat and the noise the jackals made. In the morning before it was light the black men came into the rooms, which are very large open rooms, only iron and wood rails for walls. They sat at the foot of your bedstead with a large earthen vessel on their heads, holding two or three gallons, calling out ‘Hot coffee, Sahib.’ This was done so much that my comrade, by name Makepiece but wrongly named, threw a boot at the poor fellow, broke the vessel and the hot coffee ran down his body, but did not scald him. Of course Makepiece had to pay for the coffee.⁵⁸

Journeys further up the Ganges were often difficult, as Gunner Richard Hardcastle of the Royal Horse Artillery discovered in 1857:

Nov 27th: Succeeded in getting off the sand at about 6pm yesterday having been on 30 hours. This morning we are on our way to Gazepore and I only hope we may not have another stoppage. Seeing the apparent useless attempts of our native seamen to get our vessel off the sand, our Sgt Maj asked the Captain to allow some of our men to work the capstan he refused saying that their slow movements would ameliorate the ship’s progress better than if stronger men were employed. The captain appears to give a good account of the natives generally and says they are better than English sailors for this sort of work. He has seen them, he said, work from morn’ till night, nearly one half of their time in the water, without a grumble. The little time I have been here among them I can see they are very patient and spite of you will be your slave. Even if you find one that has the advantage of a good education and speak to him as though you consider him as an equal he still thinks himself your inferior … [They] have thin lips, fine aquiline nose, noble foreheads and above all a splendid set of white teeth.⁵⁹

Units which arrived intact, like HM’s 32nd in 1846, immediately set off for their garrison up-country. ‘We were drilled to pitching and striking of tents,’ wrote Private Waterfield,

so as not to be lost when on the road. The bustle attendant upon a European camp in India was something strange to us all. The constant jabbering of the natives, and the roaring of the camels, together with elephants and buffaloes, reminds one of the striking contrast between India and peaceful England. It’s an old saying that there’s no stopping a woman’s tongue, but the women of Bengal beat all I ever saw, for they will fight, and keep up such a chatter that they may be heard above the din of the Camp.⁶⁰

In March 1834, HM’s 38th had reached Berhampore when, as Sergeant Thomas Duckworth told his parents, a drunken man was killed in an accident:

We came to this Station and he fell down the Stares when drunk and killed himself in the Company that I belong to not less than 9 or 10 Men as come to untimely end by being drunk, some drowned, some smothered, others going out to the Country and ill-treating the Natives and getting killed by them. The Barracks in Berhampore are 3 in number they are like Cotton Factorys for anything that you ever see they are 2 storeys high with flat roofs … the Barracks up the country are never more than one storey and thatched and those are not made with Brick and Mortar there is not so much Vermine in those Barracks as up the Country.⁶¹

Landing at Madraspatam – soon to be shortened by the British to Madras – was another matter altogether. There was no natural harbour, and new arrivals disembarked into local craft, either massulah surf boats or primitive catamarans, which made the perilous journey through the surf. Major Armine Mountain of HM’s 26th landed at Madras in 1829, and was shocked at the sight of the ‘catamaran’ which was to take him ashore:

It is impossible to conceive a more primitive vehicle; it consists simply of three logs of wood, some seven or eight feet long, lashed together without any attempt at excavation of bulwark, and awkwardly, though not always, brought to a point in front. On this rudest of rude rafts, generally, three natives stand in line stark naked, and with only a string tied round the waist, just above the hips; but I immediately observed the truth of Bishop Heber’s observation, that the duskiness of the skin does away with the idea of indelicacy. They were generally very small men, not so perfectly formed as I expected, and very noisy.⁶²

In 1833 Cadet Hervey, still recovering from having received his first salute from a grenadier sergeant who came on board to explain disembarkation procedures, affirmed that:

In crossing the surf some degree of skill is necessary to strand the boats in safety, and the boatmen usually demand a present for the job; but griffins [i.e. newly arrived young officers] are 50 kind and so liberal, and these boatmen are such acute judges of physiognomy, that they can tell at a glance, whether there is a possibility of success or not. If refused, they sometimes bring their boats broadside on to the surf; the consequence is a good ducking, if not an upset altogether into the briny element; this is by way of revenge …

We crossed the dreaded surf and landed in safety. Passengers are either carried out of the way of the water in a chair or on the backs of boatmen. Upon gaining a footing, I was instantly surrounded by a multitude of naked-looking savages, all jabbering away in broken English and Malabar, asking me to take a palankeen, and some actually seized hold of me, and were about to lift me into one; however, I asked the sergeant, who was with me, for his cane, which being obtained, I laid about me right and left, and soon cleared myself of the crowd.⁶³

When Lieutenant Walter Campbell reached Madras with his regiment in 1830, he described how he was immediately

beset by hawkers, jugglers, snake-charmers, ‘coolies’ and mendicants begging for coppers … After standing on the beach for upwards of an hour, braving the fury of a tropical sun and keeping our assailants at bay as well we could, the debarkation of the troops was completed and we were marched up to Bridge seven miles from Madras where we found tents pitched for our reception, and where we are to remain ten days or a fortnight to make the necessary preparations for marching up country to Bangalore.⁶⁴

Lieutenant Innes Munro of HM’s 73rd Highlanders, arriving at Madras in March 1780, recalled his comrades’ confusion on seeing Indian men:

All those natives have such a genteel and delicate mien that, together with their dress, a stranger is apt to take them for women; and it is truly laughable to hear the Highlanders, under that idea, pass their remarks upon them in the Gaelic language. ‘Only smoke the whiskers on that hussy,’ says one. ‘Well, I never supposed till now,’ observed another, ‘that there was any place in the world where the women wore beards.’ And, seeing one of them who was very corpulent stalk about the deck in an unwieldy manner, a third wondered ‘how she could have ventured on board so far gone in her pregnancy’. All of them were taken for ladies of easy virtue; and it was only in attempting to use a few familiarities with them as such that the Highlanders realised their mistake.⁶⁵

John Corneille landed at Cuddalore in September 1754 and marched to Madras with HM’s 39th Foot; on arrival the colonel was ‘saluted at entrance with thirteen guns’. He found that Madras had:

no security for ships and a roadstead wild and open, besides a most dangerous surf which makes the landing difficult and dangerous. There are two towns, the European and the Black towns. The former is well built, with lofty houses and flat roofs, but the streets are very narrow except for those immediately about the governor’s which is in the middle and was the first building the English made after they landed. It consists of a tolerably good house surrounded with offices and a slight wall, and is properly called Fort St George.

The fort was speedily rebuilt in the best modern manner to become:

one of the strongest places in India. There are several excellent good bastions, and a broad, deep, wet ditch. All the adjacent country is commanded from the bastions except a small hill at the north-west end which, if they continue as they have begun, will soon be carried away to make the glacis.⁶⁶

Albert Hervey was escorted to the fort on his arrival in Madras, entered via its north gate, and ‘the sergeant took me directly to the adjutant general’s and the town-major’s offices, where I reported myself in due form. I was then conducted to the cadet’s quarters, where I was told I should have to reside until further orders.’

He was speedily posted to a regiment inland, which saved him expense and temptation:

I write strongly against young officers being kept at Madras; because I have myself experienced the dangers and disadvantages of the station. It is ruination to a lad’s pockets, ruination to his principles, and ruination to his health; and I can only conclude the subject by saying that I think their being allowed to remain at the Presidency longer than is absolutely necessary, is a gross injustice to them. There is nothing like up-country and strict drill discipline, in my opinion.⁶⁷

Bombay was the oldest of the presidencies, for it had become British as part of the dowry of Charles II’s Queen, Catherine of Braganza; its name (now officially replaced by Mumbai) stems from the Portuguese Bom Baia, meaning good bay. Although it had an excellent natural harbour it was not well placed for the China trade, and its hinterland was dominated by the fierce Marathas and scorched by repeated war. The Hindu inhabitants were warlike: some Maratha women still wear their saris caught up between their legs to reflect the days when they might fight alongside their menfolk. John Shipp fought the Marathas, and wrote that: ‘Their wives are excellent horse-women, many of them good with sword and matchlock. They are mounted on the best horses, and it is not unusual for them to carry one child in front and one behind while riding at full speed.’⁶⁸

In 1825 Bombay was dismissed as ‘of little importance to the [East India] Company’: trade with the hinterland had only begun to be feasible with the end of the Second Maratha War in 1805 and the city lacked a natural corridor in the way that Calcutta was served by the Ganges valley. But by the 1840s the picture had begun to change. The gradual replacement of the Cape route by steam travel from Suez made Bombay the preferred port of entry, and with the development of railways internal travel was made quicker and more reliable. James Williams landed there in late 1859, and told his cousin that it was ‘the most awful place imaginable’, complaining:

We are likely to be in Bombay for some time – it is the worst station in India – nothing on earth to do save die – the voyage here was very long 129 days. There was a good deal of quarrelling that helped pass the time.

He was soon posted to a cantonment on the outskirts of Calcutta, which was altogether better he felt: ‘Calcutta is a charming place compared with Bombay. The houses are large, two-storied and comfortable. The only bother is the distance and the road we have to go over before reaching town.’⁶⁹

Bombay was the starting point for operations into Sind, and so became increasingly important in military as well as commercial terms. In 1839 a flotilla from Bombay, with HMS Wellesley, HMS Algerine, the Honourable Company’s Ship Constance and the transport Hannah, conveyed a small force including HM’s 40th Foot. The garrison of Karachi quickly fled after Wellesley ‘opened her broadside on the fort with admirable precision’ and then, as Lieutenant Martin Neill of the 40th recalled:

The Admiral and Brigadier landed in the evening to inspect the scene of their triumph after which they returned, accompanied by [Lieutenant] Colonel Powell [commanding officer of the 40th] to enjoy a comfortable dinner, while we small fry amused ourselves planting picquets.70

Soldiers bound for the garrison at Karachi faced a protracted journey. Steamers from Bombay anchored a mile offshore and passengers had to land from shallow-draught boats: it was another mile by carriage to Karachi itself. There was not much to Karachi even when you arrived, and a generous assessment of the Sind Club in 1890 suggested that although its denizens ‘“swear” by their whisky … by constantly using the same spirit without any change, the palate loses to a great extent its power of appreciation’. It would not be until the First World War, when the Mesopotamia campaign greatly increased the traffic through the port, that Karachi would really come of age.

By the 1880s Bombay was the base for one of the two lines of communication running up to the North-West Frontier. One followed the line of the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Lucknow and Peshawar, and the other ran from Bombay to Mhow and Quetta. Many battle-wounded soldiers bound for Britain came through Bombay, and on the railway north-east of the city were the barracks and military hospital at Deolali. The latter was the last leg in the evacuation of men whose nerves had given way under the influence of drink, climate and danger, and the nervous tics of its patients gave rise to the expression ‘doolally tap’. Private Frank Richards observed that Deolali was the depot where British soldiers whose enlistment terms had expired awaited a troopship home (the ‘trooping season’ then ran from October to March):

The time-expired men at Deolalie had no arms or equipment; they showed kit now and again and occasionally went on a route-march, but time hung heavily on their hands and in some cases men who had been exemplary soldiers got into serious trouble and were awarded terms of imprisonment before they were sent home.

The practice of holding men at Deolali was abolished while Richards was in India, and thereafter they went straight to ports of embarkation. ⁷¹

It was Bombay’s importance as India’s chief military port that led to construction of the symbolic Gateway to India that looks eastwards across the harbour. Planned to celebrate the accession of George V as King Emperor, it was designed, in Anglo-Saracenic style, by George Wittet: its final plans were accepted in that momentous month, August 1914. Its symbolism would continue until the very end of the Raj with the last British unit to leave India, 1st Battalion the Somerset Light Infantry (the old HM’s 13th Light Infantry of Jelalabad fame), departing from the gateway on 28 February 1948.