The Great Escape - Part 1

Here is a story which could become a blockbuster if put on screen! A fascinating account of escapes from Soviet Russia during World War II has lain buried in the files of the India Office Records. Four Poles, one Ukrainian and a Russian woman give their statements, full of discrepancies.
IOR/L/PS/12/380
Olgierd Stołyhwo and Adam Backer were at school together and fought in the Polish Army after the German invasion in 1939. Taken prisoner, they escaped hoping to join the newly formed Polish Army in France. Their chosen route through Hungary was blocked, so they made their way eastwards. They were

The Indian Comforts Fund (1939-45) – Humanitarian relief work for Indian soldiers in Europe

To commemorate VE Day on 8 May 1945, we have a story from guest blogger Dr Florian Stadtler -

The contribution made by South Asians living in Britain to the war effort on the Home Front in World War II remains little known. One organisation, run by South Asian and British women, played a particular important function. An entirely voluntary organisation, the Indian Comforts Fund (ICF) worked in close cooperation with the Indian Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance Service.

Serena Livingstone-Stanley: unsung heroine of imperial exploration

A guest blog from Raymond Howgego whose work featured in Hedley Sutton's last post -
In 1936 the normally staid London publisher, Chatto & Windus, published a stirring account of two women travellers’ adventures in a distant outpost of empire. Entitled Through Darkest Pondelayo, and written by the appropriately christened adventuress Serena Livingstone-Stanley, it was presented in the form of letters back home, edited by one Rev. Barnaby Whitecorn D.D., the author’s ‘next door neighbour’.


The author, together with her female travelling companion Francis and long-suffering maidservant Placket, sail from Harwich on ‘May 14th’ (year unspecified), and via the Mediterranean and Suez Canal reach

Friedrich Spassvogel – an unlived life!

Some lives are untold for a good reason. Several years ago Asian and African Studies added to the stock of their Reading Room a four-volume Encyclopaedia of Exploration compiled by Raymond Howgego (OIA 910.903). What was remarkable about this was that it included a note in the first volume stating that one of the thousands of entries was completely fictitious, and a case of champagne was offered to the first reader diligent enough to identify the spoof. I recognized a kindred spirit in Mr Howgego, but quailed at attempting to comb through well over 3000 pages of text.  

The champagne has been claimed (and no doubt drunk). The indefatigable winner, a German gentleman living in Nice, proved correct in recognizing that his putative fellow countryman, Friedrich Spassvogel - born in Hildesheim in 1606, lost an eye in battle during the Thirty Years' War, went to sea in the 'Treibend' in 1632 in an attempt to break the Anglo-Dutch monopoly in trade with the East, captured and taken to Nova Scotia, escaped to Maine, tried to establish a colony in Georgia, captured for a second time by Spaniards and imprisoned along with his native American wife in Madrid, freed after the payment of a ransom, published his memoirs in Leipzig in 1658 which were later translated into Dutch, French and English, died in Cologne in 1672 - never actually existed. A clue is provided by his surname, which means 'wag'.

Map of the southern part of the coast of Maine c. 1680. (Add. 13970 A)
© The British Library Board


Mr Howgego has just completed a fifth volume of his Encyclopaedia, and appropriately enough this is about imaginary travel narratives.

Meanwhile, I believe that the film rights to 'The Adventures of Friedrich Spassvogel' are still available ...

Hedley Sutton
Asian and African Studies Reference Team Leader

Botanical discoveries and beastly bungalows

RHS National Gardening Week seems a good time to highlight the work of East India Company botanists such as John Forbes Royle who from 1823 was Superintendent of Saharanpur Botanic Garden, located about 1,000 miles west of Calcutta. He was part of a network of people collecting and describing plants, managing botanic gardens and experimenting with plant transfers, often in difficult conditions. Their work led to changes to agricultural production in India and the introduction of new plants to British gardens.
Royle's article in the Journal of the Asiatic Society (1832) tells us that as well as appreciating the aesthetic qualities of plants, he valued botany for its usefulness to medicine and for developing new sources of food and economic products. He believed that the practical benefits of

Whatever happened to Eliza Armstrong?

One hundred years ago William Thomas Stead died in the Titanic disaster aged 62.  He had enjoyed a long career as a journalist and newspaper editor, campaigning on political and social issues. 

 
   W T Stead © UIG/The British Library Board    BL Images Online 

In November 1885 Stead was sentenced at the Old Bailey to three months’ imprisonment for his part in the Eliza Armstrong case. He had intended to highlight the scandal of child prostitution by arranging to buy 13-year old Eliza for £5 from her mother through an intermediary Rebecca Jarrett.   The story of the sale of ‘Lily’ was published by Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette in 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon'.

Half cat, half rabbit: a zoo in Bloomsbury

Doctor Dolittle, in the novels by Hugh Lofting, had ‘rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet and a hedgehog in the cellar’.  It could almost be a description of Sir Hans Sloane.  In addition to his vast collections of books and manuscripts, natural history specimens, antiquities and curiosities of all kinds, Sloane owned a surprising number of live animals, which he kept in the garden of his house in Bloomsbury Place just down the street from the modern British Museum.

Yvonne FitzRoy and Victor Sassoon

A recent enquiry about the papers of Yvonne FitzRoy [IOPP/ Mss Eur E312] led to the discovery of the letters of Victor Sassoon – a legendary figure in 1930s Shanghai. 

Yvonne FitzRoy (1891-1971), was a society lady with a progressive mind.  She was a theatre actress before the First World War.  But her acting career was cut short when she was summoned by the Scottish Women’s Hospital (supported by the National Union of Scottish Women’s Suffrage Societies) to serve as a volunteer nurse in Romania and Russia.  She was awarded a Russian medal at the end of the War, and continued her adventures in India where she worked as the private secretary for the wife of the Viceroy from 1920 to 1926.  It was probably during this time that she became acquainted with Sir Victor Sassoon, a member of the Indian Legislative Council. 

Yvonne FitzRoy in India, 1923. [Mss Eur E312/14. ©The British Library Board]
Victor Sassoon came to know Yvonne better through his connections with the English aristocracy.  In the early 1920s Sassoon purchased a stately home, West Green House in Hampshire but he never had much

Duke of Cambridge supports campaign against London vice

Prince Adolphus Frederick, first Duke of Cambridge, (1774-1850), son of George III, was a patron of many good causes and benevolent institutions.  One of the associations he supported was the London Society for the Protection of Young Females which was established in 1835.  The Society aimed to suppress juvenile prostitution in the metropolis by
• Closing houses in which juvenile prostitution was encouraged
• Punishing those procuring young girls
• Protecting the ‘unhappy victims’.

East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

From Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Mutiny of 1857, Britain’s empire on the subcontinent was administered by the East India Company. A chartered monopoly, the Company significantly expanded its fiscal, territorial and military grip on the subcontinent in the century before its abolition in 1858. By the later 1750s, its servants (that is, its civil and military officers) enjoyed unprecedented access to Asian goods, through bribes, ceremonial gifting, private commerce and the spoils of war. Togethe r with the Company’s official cargoes of Indian and Chinese commodities, these goods helped to transform British families’ material sensibilities and homes.

Bengal Army officers - names, nationalities, fatalities and a phantom

There are many 'untold lives' to be found in the pages of the biographical compilations in the Asian & African Studies Reading Room, one of which is Lives of the officers of the Bengal Army, 1758 - 1834 by Major V.C.P. Hodson (OIR355.332).

Portrait of Adam Atkinson of the Bengal Army by A.W. Devis, Calcutta 1789 (Foster 1065) 

© The British Library Board Images Online


Some of the most fascinating information is to be found in the appendices near the very end of the work, even if some entries leave the casual browser keen to know more. Appendix D, for example, is concerned

“Shrapnel Biddulph” – telegraph engineer, soldier, romantic and artist

Captain Michael Anthony Shrapnel Biddulph was posted to Turkey in 1854, and shortly afterwards to the Crimea, where he served with distinction as assistant engineer of the Royal Artillery, and later as director of submarine telegraphs in the Black Sea. Decorated by the French and Turkish governments, in 1856 he was promoted Brevet Lieutenant Colonel. In 1858 he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Ottoman Telegraph, overseeing the construction of telegraph cable lines in Turkey-in-Asia.

 
Vignette (1)

Vignettes taken from Plan of a Portion of the Constantinople and Bussorah [Basra] Line of Telegraph. War Office, 1860. Maps R.U.S.I. A20.4.

Benevolence from Bengal: Amir Chand’s bequest

The mercantile classes have long been associated with acts of charity within the communities in which they live and the records of the East India Company provide ample evidence of numerous philanthropic deeds. One notable example is a bequest left by one of India’s most famous eighteenth century merchants Amir Chand [Omichund, Umichund].

A major trader with the Nawabs of Bengal and the East India Company, Amir Chand is best remembered

Sir Josiah’s Disobedient Child

Sir Josiah Child (bap.1631, d.1699) was the successful son of a London merchant. He made a large fortune as a brewer and victualler and through the Royal African and East India Companies. Child bought an estate at Wanstead in Essex and lavished money on landscaping. Palladian Wanstead House pictured below was built after Sir Josiah’s death by his son Richard.

View of Wanstead House, by G. Robertson; engraved by Fittler
BL: Maps.K.Top.13.30.d © The British Library Board Images Online

Child was active in local politics, sat as an MP, and served nearly 25 years as an East India Company director, with two periods as Governor. He was the author of a number of economic tracts, and his letters and published works can be read today in the British Library. He married three times and had eight children.

Family budgets in 1920s India

The Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services in India (the Lee Commission) was appointed in 1923 to enquire into the organisation and general conditions of service, the possibility of transferring any duties and functions to provincial services, and the recruitment of Europeans and Indians.
To assist in its enquiry into the conditions of service the Royal Commission collected examples of the budgets of individual members of the civil service, some very detailed. The general thrust of the evidence submitted was the rising cost of living in India and the inadequate pay of civil servants.
One example is a budget submitted with the written evidence of the Indian Educational Association, Burma (IOR/Q/11/24 No.1002). It compares the Bazaar prices of various goods in 1913/14 and 1923, such as foodstuffs, furniture, crockery and clothes, and lists the cost of the various types of servants (head boy, ayah, cook, paniwallah, sweeper, chauffeur, dhobi, mali, etc).
The anonymous monthly budget of a Professor in the University of Rangoon in his first year of service gives an interesting insight in to what civil servants felt they had to spend to keep up what they saw as their status in the community in which they lived and worked, both in the eyes of other Europeans and of native Indians. The Professor had four servants (personal boy, driver, sweeper and dhobi), employed a typist, owned a car, subscribed to a large number of scientific societies and was a member of three clubs (Golf Club, Gymkhana Club and Boat Club). His wife suffered a break down in her health after only a short time in Burma and had to return to England, and he lists the expenses associated with doctors' bills and her return passage. In fact expenses associated with medical problems were a

The search for Black Rock Part II

Here is the second part of our story from the Andaman Islands contributed by guest blogger N. Francis Xavier.
Giant trees rose on either side of the narrow trail as it snaked through the tropical forest forming a thick canopy overhead. Huge lianas hung down from their branches like pythons.  The trail seemed endless as it dipped and rose and again dipped into the evergreen forest.