🎧 TO CATCH A KING: CHARLES II’S GREAT ESCAPE

/in , /by

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival 2018.
In 1651 the Royalist forces were crushed by the might of Cromwell’s armies at the Battle of Worcester. For the next six weeks the future Charles II was hunted by his father’s killers, who now wanted him dead too. Using Samuel Pepys’ original account, Charles Spencer brings to life the thrilling story of one of the greatest escapes in British history.

Charles Spencer obtained his degree in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a reporter on NBC’s Today Show from 1986 until 1995, and is the author of several books, including Sunday Times bestseller Blenheim: Battle for Europe (shortlisted for History Book of the Year at the 2005 National Book Awards), Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, Killers of the King and To Catch a King: Charles II’s Great Escape.

He will be speaking about Prince Rupert of the Rhine on Thursday 27th June – tickets are available here.

🎧 DUNKIRK

/in , /by

Recording from Chalke Valley History Festival 2017.
James Holland looks at one of the most iconic moments in Britain’s history. He examines the background to the German attack on the West in May 1940, challenging many of our deeply held perceptions, and explaining why the British evacuation of Dunkirk was, and remains, such a significant event.

Gold, Frank-intentions and Murder

/in , /by

By the summer of 1940 Britain stood alone on the edge of Europe with nothing to protect her apart from the Channel.

This is an oft stated fact that has become entirely accepted by a large majority of the British population today. But is it true? Strictly speaking, yes. Geographically we stand on the edge of the European continent and always have done. There is nothing new in that claim. But the implication here when set in the context of the early summer of 1940 is that of plucky little Britain, with its population of 38 million, standing shoulder to shoulder to face the threat of a German invasion entirely alone and with no support from anyone. That is the bit that is not true and it does history a great disservice to ignore the massive contribution made by our friends and allies both that summer and in the subsequent springs, summers, autumns and winters that followed.

By the time the Battle of Britain took place, London was host to seven foreign governments-in-exile and the hot-headed French General, Charles de Gaulle, had arrived as well. None of them came empty handed. 

The Norwegian government leant the British more than 1,300 vessels from their fleet, the fourth largest and most modern merchant fleet in the world, which sailed with the Atlantic convoys for the whole war. In 1941 a British official declared that the Norwegian merchant fleet was worth ‘more than an army of a million men’. That was an enormously valuable contribution and one that was not without risk. Many Norwegian sailors would lose their lives in the heaving seas of the submarine-infested waters of the North Atlantic. In addition, King Haakon of Norway brought 1400 soldiers, 1,000 sailors and a small number of pilots that grew rapidly over the next few months. 

The Belgians donated their substantial gold reserves and over the course of the war shipped 1,375 tons of uranium from their stocks to the USA to fuel the Manhattan project. 

The Dutch government and their magnificent Queen Wilhelmina, who was described by Churchill as the only real man among the governments-in-exile in London brought six hundred ships from its mercantile fleet and rich resources from the Dutch East Indies. 

Jozef Gabcik, one of the two assassins of Reinhard Heydrich

Jan Kubis, the assassin who threw the grenade that killed Heydrich

The Czechs’ contribution was brilliant intelligence from inside Nazi Germany. Their main agent, A54 as he was known, was a high-ranking Abwehr officer who divulged highly valuable secrets until his eventual capture in 1941. He told the Czechs about the build-up of Goering’s Luftwaffe, he gave them the code for German wirelesses in 1938. It was a sinister code: Heil 15 März and a week before Prague was invaded (on 15 March 1939) he told them that the Germans had been instructed to round up all intelligence officers and treat them with great harshness. His warnings helped the intelligence services to evacuate to London the night before the invasion. In 1942 two agents, one Czech, one Slovak, carried out the most audacious assassination of the highest-ranking Nazi to be murdered: Acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. Jozef Gabčik and Jan Kubiš were trained in Britain and flown to Bohemia by the RAF to carry out the murder. Our past is inextricably linked to the former Czechoslovakia.

Charles de Gaulle’s contribution would take longer to materialise but his presence in London cannot be underestimated. Churchill, passionately supportive of the French, gave de Gaulle every encouragement as he gradually built up the Free French army and encouraged the development of the Resistance. Many of their agents were trained in Britain and used safe houses all over the country, including one in Sussex which features in Our Uninvited Guests, to stay while waiting for flights into occupied France.

End House, used during the war as a secret training base for Polish agents.

The Poles brought fighter pilots to the Battle of Britain. They were among a total of 8,000 airmen and 20,000 soldiers as well as hundreds of sailors manning three destroyers, two submarines and a number of smaller vessels who arrived here after the Fall of France. By the end of the war the Polish was the fourth largest Allied Force after Russia, the USA and the British Empire. Critically they also sent an early decoded version of the Enigma machine for the British security services. It was the Poles in 1932 who first worked out how to use the German Enigma machines and they had been reading German messages for the greater part of seven years by the time the war broke out. I’m not saying the coders at Bletchley Park could not have done their work without Polish help but it might not have happened so quickly. We owe the Poles more than we ever imagine. That is why I have dedicated my book to them. They might have been Uninvited Guests but they were brilliant guests to have on our side.

Auxiliary Units trained at Coleshill House near Swindon from the summer of 1940 until they were stood down in late 1944

Closer to home we had the Auxiliary Units, young men and women recruited in the summer of 1940 to act as a sabotage force to work behind the lines in the event of an invasion. They were told their work was so secret that they could not tell anyone about it outside the tiny groups of six or so who would man an observation post, underground, and plan their attacks on bridges, railway lines, petrol stores and so on. The life expectancy of an Auxilier had the Germans invaded was estimated to be no more than fourteen days. Their training centre was based at Coleshill House, home of the Pleydell-Bouverie family, just outside the village of Highworth in Wiltshire, close to the railway hub of Swindon, meaning that trainees from all over the country could reach Coleshill with relative ease. The man who developed the training programme to turn vicars, poachers, farmers and schoolteachers into saboteurs and silent killers was Brigadier Sir Colin McVean Gubbins, the man who would later be in charge of Special Operations Executive.

When you next hear somebody misusing history, please suggest they might like to read Our Uninvited Guests and remind themselves of the real behind the scenes story of the summer of 1940.

 

 

 

 

Julie Summers is a bestselling author and historian. Her books include: Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine; The Colonel of Tamarkan, a biography of her grandfather, the man who built the ‘real’ bridge on the River Kwai; Stranger in the House, a social history of servicemen reuniting with their families after the Second World War, and When the Children Came Home, which tells the story of returning evacuees. Her book Jambusters was the inspiration for ITV’s hit drama series Home Fires, which ran for two seasons in 2015–16.

Julie will be speaking at Chalke Valley History Festival on Friday 28th June about Our Uninvited Guests: The Secret Lives of Britain’s Country Houses. Tickets are available here.

🎧 THE GREEDY QUEEN: EATING WITH VICTORIA

/in , /by

From a recording at Chalke Valley History Festival 2017.
Come and sit down at the royal table and open the kitchen door to hear about what Victoria ate, and how she changed English food forever. Based on intriguing original research, historian Annie Gray shows the Queen’s absolute reliance on food as well as delving below stairs for a proper look at the cooks who played such an important role.

🎧 LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF HIMMLER

/in , /by

Recording from Chalke Valley History Festival 2017.
Katrin Himmler is a German author and political scientist. Her great-uncle was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and one of the principle architects of the Holocaust. Katrin has confronted her family legacy with a book, Die Brüder Himmler, translated into English as ‘The Himmler Brothers. A German Family History’. She has also edited, together with the historian Michael Wildt, private letters from Himmler that had been only recently discovered in Israel. The Private Heinrich Himmler: Letters of a Mass Murderer was published in the UK last year. Here, in conversation with James Holland, she discusses Himmler, his brothers, and reveals the burden of this Nazi family legacy.

🎧 SPITFIRE: A VERY BRITISH LOVE STORY

/in , /by

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival 2018.
Former RAF Tornado navigator John Nichol was shot down and held as a prisoner-of-war during the 1991 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Having served on operations in Bosnia, the Falklands and the Gulf, he understands the reality of battle and the enduring allure of combat aircraft, especially the iconic Spitfire. In this talk, he discusses his own experiences of war alongside the remarkable and enduring story of the Spitfire and the men and women who designed, built and flew it.

John Ruskin: a Victorian visionary for today

/in , /by

John Ruskin, depicted with the founders of Ruskin, Florida, on a 2008 mural by Mike Parker, painted on the centenary of the community’s foundation on Ruskinian ideals (photo: Mike Parker)

By the end of the 19th century, John Ruskin – sage, social critic, artist, scientist, environmental  campaigner – was perhaps the most famous living Victorian apart from Queen Victoria herself (who was also born 200 years ago this year).

Yet after his death in 1900, aged 80, this remarkable polymath’s fame quickly faded. For much of the 20th century, his reputation seemed as dead and buried as the man himself.

For those who have heard of him, the Victorian age’s best-known, most controversial and most prolific intellectual is still a bearded old has-been: prudish, aloof, self-righteous, conservative to a fault, and resistant to progress.

The motto and emblem chosen by Ruskin and featured on his books. (photo courtesy: The Ruskin, Lancaster University)

Ruskin’s personal motto, stamped on later editions of his books, was, however, powerful, simple, and remains highly relevant: ‘To-day’. He rallied followers to take on practical challenges and to do now what they might otherwise put off until tomorrow.

Ruskin shaped – and still shapes – the world we live in, the way we think and work, the environment, built and natural, that surrounds us, and many of the services we enjoy. Two hundred years since his birth, we live in ‘Ruskinland’.

It becomes obvious that Ruskinland exists as soon as you pick up the trail of Ruskin, say in an art gallery or a museum. Those are the places where his legacy is most obvious, but he is also present in the work of craftspeople and artisans, the thinking of ecologists and scientists, and even in the dry regulatory crevices of modern finance, or the ambitious mission and purpose statements of big companies.

Many people know at least a little about John Ruskin or his work. Very few people, though, have sight of the whole of Ruskin – which is hardly surprising given the protean, polymathic nature of the man and his thinking.

As a teenager, studying the history of art, I acquired the best-known piece of the patchwork: his role as artist and art critic, a fixture in London artistic circles before he had turned forty. When I revisited Venice for the first time in decades, I found that the places and works that astonished and energised Ruskin in the 19th century – the Tintorettos in the Scuola di San Rocco, the Carpaccios in the Accademia – were on my itinerary in the second half of the 20th, when I first visited his ‘paradise of cities’, aged 16, with a school art trip. As a regular traveller in the Lake District, with a holiday home not far from Brantwood, I knew about Ruskin’s love of the region. I was well aware that Oxford boasted a Ruskin College and a Ruskin School of Art.
But even to those who know a part of Ruskin’s legacy, other parts remain obscure.

My quest to learn more about Ruskin’s influence really started, though, when I came across his social and economic criticism, and observations on the environment, which seem ever more relevant in an unequal and polluted world. It turned out that people who knew about those corners of Ruskinland were as eager to show me round as I was to explain my journey through other regions of his influence.

The whistlestop tour – which, incidentally, Ruskin, one of the greatest and most leisurely travellers in history, would never deign to join – goes like this.

Ruskin’s ideas sowed the seeds of the modern welfare state, universal state education and healthcare free at the point of delivery.

His acute appreciation of natural beauty underpinned the National Trust, while his sensitivity to pollution and environmental change, decades before it was considered other than a local phenomenon, prefigured the modern green movement.

He staked his reputation on Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites when they were under fire, ensuring their reputations have continued to burn brightly even as his has suffered.

Ruskin’s 1894 portrait, on the wall at the Unto This Last furniture workshop in Brick Lane, London (photo: Unto This Last)

His violent critique of free market economics, Unto This Last, was the title that most influenced the first intake of Labour MPs in 1906 – more than 40 years after its publication.Those articles, and a series of other writings and lectures in which Ruskin laid into the smug captains of Victorian capitalism, are striking precursors of the current debate about inequality, executive pay, ethical and purposeful business, and the perils and opportunities of greater automation.

Ruskin may have claimed not to enjoy a fight, but as a young man, he was not afraid to provoke and pursue debate, through all contemporary media, including books, magazines, pamphlets and letters to newspapers. His insights are often strikingly modern. For instance, his withering assessment of the contemporary condition, from the fifth volume of his book Modern Painters, is no less relevant than it was when it was published in 1860. People appear, he wrote, to have ‘no other desire or hope but to have large houses and to be able to move fast’.

In his prime, Ruskin was also a hugely popular public speaker, attracting sell-out audiences and lively press criticism with his controversial views and idiosyncratic approach. He would not have been an obvious proponent of the popular TeD talk, with its time limit of 20 minutes. His lectures often lasted over an hour. But as a speaker, he had a gift, as one modern biographer has written, for being ‘both combative and inspiring’.

As a man who wrote some nine million published words in his lifetime, Ruskin would have struggled with Twitter’s 280-character limit, that is for sure.
But I’m certain he would have been a regular and avidly followed tweeter.

What is more, his intense visual sense and interest in early photographic technology would make him a natural enthusiast for today’s image-based social media. Who would not want to follow the world’s most discerning eye for natural and manmade beauty on Instagram?

Ruskin is hard to categorise.‘I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times,’ he said. At different times described himself as a ‘violent Tory of the old school’ and ‘a Communist of the old school – reddest also of the red’, which always makes me think: that must have been some school.

Despite the contradictions – and his own often tortured personal life, which ended in reclusive, mentally troubled near-silence – John Ruskin reminds us of many positive ways to live better today.

He wasn’t the only 19th-century thinker preoccupied with how his world was changing and how to guide it down the best path. But he was among the most prescient and inspirational. Without him and his more pragmatic and campaigning followers – from William Morris to Mahatma Gandhi – many of the enlightened ideas of the modern world would have taken longer to evolve, probably developed differently, and in some cases might not have developed at all.

Andrew is an award-winning journalist at the Financial Times and author of Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes Our World (Pallas Athene). He writes a weekly column for the FT on business, strategy and leadership, as well as contributing longer features, videos and podcasts and appearing regularly at conferences and on panels.

He was named Business Commentator of the Year 2016 in the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards. He is also the author of Leadership in the Headlines (2016). Andrew is a trustee of The Ruskin Foundation, which has been responsible for the UK’s largest archive of material relating John Ruskin, and chair of the Blueprint Trust, the charity behind Blueprint for Better Business, which challenges business to be a force for good.

Andrew will be speaking at Chalke Valley History Festival about John Ruskin on Thursday, 27th June and tickets can be purchased here: How John Ruskin Shapes Our World.

THE KREMLIN LETTERS: DAVID REYNOLDS ON THE CORRESPONDENCE OF CHURCHILL, ROOSEVELT AND STALIN

/in , /by

This article was previously published by Yale University Press.

For nearly four years, and against all the odds, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin led the most effective alliance in history. Yet they met face-to-face only twice. Instead, the ‘Big Three’ had to communicate through secret telegrams and coded letters. They exchanged more than six hundred messages between 22 June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and Roosevelt’s sudden death on 12 April 1945. And, as this extraordinary correspondence demonstrates, each member of this implausible trio became fascinated by the other two, genuinely trying, in his distinctive way, to build personal relationships.

From birthday wishes to arranging meetings and discussing the war, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin’s correspondence reveal hidden nuances in how they interacted during that crucial time in the world’s history. In this article, David Reynolds reflects on the process of piecing together the story of The Kremlin Letters, co-authored with Vladimir Pechatnov.

Churchill and Roosevelt waged war as allies for nearly four years. Yet they met face to face for less than two weeks. Our book shows how the triumvirate conducted their relationship most of the time: through the now unfashionable medium of letter-writing. The result – we believe – is a novel perspective on the Big Three, as human beings and as political leaders.

Constructing a narrative from the letters of the ‘Big Three’

The actual letters have been available for sixty years – the Soviet Foreign Ministry published them in Russian and English in 1957, partly in retaliation for piecemeal quotation by Churchill and other memoirists. But, although largely accurate, this was simply an edition of the raw messages, lacking much context and with the British and American strands printed in separate volumes. Our book brings the messages together in a single chronological sequence, thereby unfolding the story of the wartime alliance from Hitler’s invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 to Roosevelt’s sudden death on 12 April 1945. And we go beyond the standard format of such edited texts in what John Gaddis – doyen of Cold War historians – has generously called “a pioneering effort to embed documents within a single sustained narrative.”

That narrative has been constructed from a much larger database pieced together from the archives of all three countries in a research project generously supported by grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy and the Russkiy Mir Foundation. The database includes drafts of the messages, discussions about their proposed content – particularly in the British War Cabinet – and invaluable accounts from the ambassadorial delivery boys about how the messages were actually received. Among these men, Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s man in London till mid-1943, takes the prize for his vivid renditions of Churchill’s varied and highly emotional reactions. Here are a few extracts: “His face was white as chalk and he was breathing heavily. He was obviously enraged … He shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them I could see tears … Churchill must have had a drop too much whisky.”

Both photos: The “Big Three” at Tehran, November 1943

New material from the Russian Archives

It is the Russian material that gives the book much of its novelty and freshness – not just from theMaisky diary (now available in English thanks to Gabriel Gorodetsky and Yale University Press), but from the Stalin fonds in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation and the Foreign Ministry Archive in Moscow. These were mined exhaustively by Vladimir and his junior colleague Iskander Magadeyev. Here we can see at work the remarkable team of Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, from whose office most of the draft messages originated, and Josef Stalin, unquestionably editor-in-chief.

All this documentation reveals in rich detail the Big Three’s “epistolary relationship.” Not quite on a par with the letters exchanged by Voltaire and Catherine the Great, let alone Abelard and Héloïse, but in its own way memorable and significant. Some messages dealt with weighty issues such as the Second Front, the Arctic convoys and the fate of Poland – on all of which Churchill and Stalin often had explosive arguments. At other times the exchanges were lighter, even chatty: news from the battlefronts, congratulations on notable successes, and occasional digs at foreign leaders such as Charles de Gaulle. Churchill and Stalin even exchanged birthday greetings each year.

Churchill and the “two Stalins”

Yet Churchill never quite fathomed the Soviet leader: to explain the apparently inexplicable mix of letters – sometimes on the same day – he developed the concept of “two Stalins.” Friendly messages were deemed to be from the man himself, while nasty ones were attributed to pressures from dark forces in the shadows of the Kremlin.

Others in London and Washington shared this binary image, yet it was a bizarre illusion. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has recently underlined [in her book On Stalin’s Team, 2015], Stalin worked with a team, but none of them – certainly not Molotov – had any doubt who was Boss. The Soviet leader managed to build relationships with his allies, while retaining the ability to keep them guessing. His growing skill as a diplomatist is clearly documented in the book. This was one of the most surprising features of the correspondence for assistant editor Olga Kucherenko – a specialist in the social history of the Great Patriotic War. We think that our readers will be equally intrigued.

Left to right: 1. Stalin’s cri de coeur, September 1941 2. Letter from Churchill, September 1941 3. Harry Hopkins in Stalin’s Kremlin office, July 1941 4. Ivan Maisky and Churchill, August 1941

Roosevelt and Stalin

Churchill and Stalin were the more prolific correspondents. Roosevelt, by contrast, sent fewer messages and generally relied on drafts from aides and government departments – adding just a few personal touches. FDR often used VIP envoys, such as right-hand man Harry Hopkins or former Ambassador to Moscow Joseph Davies, to ensure access to Stalin. On their return to Washington, the Wheelchair President would pump them for every possible insight into the Kremlin recluse. Roosevelt’s real goal was to use the correspondence to pave the way for personal meetings and thereby bring the Soviet Union in from the cold. Ideally, he wanted one-on-one discussions with Stalin, without Churchill – whom FDR considered a benighted Victorian imperialist, unable to imagine a post-colonial world.

The President’s efforts to arrange these meetings bulk large in correspondence. We can watch his gambits and also the adroit way Stalin played his cards, aware of the President’s ardour. He declined to meet until the USSR was in a strong military position after the Red Army’s victory at Kursk in July 1943, and he also forced FDR to come to him – at Teheran and then at Yalta. The first trip undermined Roosevelt’s health, the second finished him off.

Left to right: 1. Vyacheslav Molotov lands in Scotland, May 1942 2. Molotov is met by Admiral Ernest J. King (left), Ambassador Litvinov, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and General George C. Marshall, June 1942 3. Molotov, Maisky and Churchill on the veranda at 10 Downing Street, May 1942 4. Soviet and US airmen pose in front of a P-63 fighter, Alaska 1943

Yet, as our final chapter shows, in the last months of his life the dying president finally became the senior partner at the Western end of the correspondence. On paper, as in the war effort as a whole, Washington was now calling the shots. It is striking that hardly any of some 3,400 words that the White House sent to the Kremlin in the last six weeks of Roosevelt’s life were composed by Franklin Roosevelt. But they were authentically his voice. It was a remarkable and moving story – as you will understand when you read The Kremlin Letters.

David Reynolds is professor of international history at Cambridge University and the author of eleven books. Vladimir Pechatnov, a prolific scholar of the Cold War, is chair of European and American studies, Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

David will be at Chalke Valley History Festival on Wednesday 26th June to speak about THE KREMLIN LETTERS. Tickets are available to book here.

She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen by Katie Hickman

/in , /by
Courtesy of Katie Hickman/ Sunday Times

In February 1617, a young woman, Frances Webb, set sail for India on board an East India Company [EIC] vessel, the New Year’s Gift.   In the 17th Century, the company had strict rules prohibiting women from their voyages, but Frances Webb and another Englishwoman, Mrs Hudson, had managed to circumvent them by claiming to be the female attendants of a third, an Armenian Christian, Mrs Towerson, who had married an English sea captain, and was returning home with him to the Mughal city of Agra.  

It did not go well.  

 “Before I pass the equinoctal, I am to acquaint your Honours and Worships with a strange accident which hath happened contrary I do think to any of your expectations,” the Master of the New Year’s Gift wrote in a letter to the Company directors in London.  “One of the gentlewomen which came with Captain Towerson and his wife is great with child, and at present is so big that I fear that if she have not twins she will hardly hold out to Surat [the Mughal port on the coast of Gujarat].”  It transpired that the pregnant woman, Frances Webb, had not only formed a liaison with one of her fellow travellers, Richard Steele, but at some point on the journey had actually married him, “under a tree.” (The East India Company archive is surprisingly full of these lively details.)  Clearly, the couple had hoped that her pregnancy could be kept secret until they arrived in India, “but that her belly told tales,” the Master noted acerbically, “and could no longer be hid under the name of a timpany.”  

Unlike the groups of women I have written about in the past – women married to British diplomats, in Daughters of Britannia, and 18th and 19th century English courtesans, about whom very little was generally known – when I came to research a book about the experiences of British women in India I found that absolutely everyone had an opinion.  

Usually it was the same opinion.  Everyone knew that the widening of the cultural divide between the British and Indians was entirely due to the increasing numbers of women who made their way to India in the ‘fishing fleets’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Everyone knew that if it were not for the snobbery and racial prejudice of the memsahibs there would, somehow, have been far greater harmony and accord between the races.   And, most particularly, everyone knew that it was women who somehow had put a stop to the inter-racial marriages that were such a pleasant multi-cultural feature of life – for English men, naturally – in 18th  century India.   Indolent, racist, snobbish, passive – the legacy of the British memsahib seemed to have become stuck in some hazy notion of the Raj, with all its attendant, imperial evils.

But before the mid-19th century, though, there was no Raj.  Between the foundation of the East India Company in 1600 and the birth of the British Empire in India stretches a period of 250 years.  During this time many thousands of women found their way to India.  Who were they?  And what on earth can possibly have induced them to make a journey that was as long and dangerous as a voyage into outer space might be today?  

Mistresses Webb and Husdon would have been well aware that the round trip to India could take several years to complete.   During that time they would be at risk not only of hurricanes, piracy, shipwreck, and attacks by rival merchant ships, but also of disease.   There are accounts of vessels so ravaged by the ‘bloody flux’ [dysentery] that they sailed into harbour as ghost ships, every person on board either dead or dying.   

Despite Frances Webb’s unexpected acquisition of a husband and baby en route, domestic bliss cannot have been the reason for their journey.  These women were tough adventurers, every bit as intrepid as the men.  Once arrived in Surat – and in direct defiance of the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, who tried everything in his power to force them to return to England –  they set off almost immediately to travel five hundred miles from Surat to Agra.  

Frances Webb was soon living in some style, with a coach, a ‘palinke’ [palanquin], seven horses and ten servants at her command.  More unusually still, she caught the attention of some of the women of the Emperor Jahangir’s court, with whom she found herself on frequent visiting terms.  Her account of one of these visits of courtesy, complete with a detailed description of the ox-drawn chariots, slaves, clothes, gift-giving and feasting involved, is the first of its kind, and predates all others by Englishwomen by more than 120 years.  

While Mrs Webb was busy making friends at the Mughal court, her companion, Mrs Hudson, had other, even more interesting ideas. She had arrived in India with £100 (equivalent to £24,000 today) and immediately set about investing it.   First, she tried to put her money into indigo, but the EIC merchants, jealous of their monopoly, soon put a stop to that.  Instead, they suggested that she invest in cloth –  and stood back, one feels, to have a good laugh at her expense.   “She may be lucky as a calling duck,” Roe wrote with heavy irony, “and therefore try her.”    

As it turned out, it was Mrs Hudson who had the last laugh.  By time she returned to England two years later she had amassed a cargo so considerable that the freight alone was £30 (more than £7,000 today) making her the first of many successful ‘she-merchants’ to ply their trade in India.  

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the land-grabbing, tax-collecting, para-military behemoth that the East India Company would one day become, was no such thing.  Not only did it have no thoughts of conquest, but for many years was not even the most successful trader to the Indies, frequently bested by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French.   Its first territory on the subcontinent was acquired almost by accident.  The tiny archipelago of Bombay had originally come to the newly-restored Charles II as part of the dowry of his bride, the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza.  Charles sent troops there, and then in 1668, not knowing what to do with it, leased it to the Company, for a rent of £10 “in gold, on 30th September, yearly, forever.”  

Having spent a good deal of time trying to keep women out of India, the Company now reversed its policy completely.  For the new colony to succeed it needed to be populated, and for this to happen was going to need more than the handful of emaciated soldiers that was all that was left of Charles’s troops.  From being an expensive nuisance, women became, almost overnight, a necessary evil. 

Ever pragmatic, the company put out an advertisement, hoping to lure suitable women across the seas.  First, their aim was to attract couples; then – perhaps thinking of the plight of the soldiers who were still languishing there – it was spinsters, so long as they were ‘of sober and civil lives.’  “That if any single women or maids, related to the soldiers or others… shall be willing to go to Bombay,” it was announced in the Company minutes on 30th December, 1668,  “20 shall be permitted to do so at the Company’s expense.”

When this largesse did not have the desired effect, the EIC tried a different tactic.  In order that there might be “a supply of young maidens, that have had a virtuous education,” those on the Company committees who were also governors of Christ’s Hospital – a charitable institution for orphans – were urged to find “young women bred up there to be disposed of in this way.”  The desired age group of this job lot was to be between twelve and thirty.  

It is hard to imagine the thoughts of an otherwise destitute twelve-year-old as she made her way, friendless and alone, to the west coast of India in the 1670’s; nor is it known how many young women took up the Company’s offer, but it is certain that at least some did,  perhaps not so much the spirit of adventure as out of sheer desperation.  Bombay had a higher mortality rate than anywhere else in India – “two mussuouns” [monsoons] was one contemporary estimate of the average life expectancy, while not more than one in twenty children lived into adulthood .  Despite this, the colony prospered. 

By the beginning of the 18th century, the company had thriving communities in three key settlements:  Madras, Calcutta and Bombay.  The numbers of European women in India were still tiny – in Bengal at this time a few hundred at most – but there were just enough for a society of sorts.  Women attended balls and masquerades, sent home for the latest fashions, drove about in expensive carriages, and amused themselves with high-stakes gambling (a terse EIC directive from 1721 laments the outposts infected by “the itch of gaming”.)   

De rigeur for all newly arrived ladies with social ambitions was the curious ritual of the “setting up ceremony”.  Charlotte Hickey, the wife of the diarist William Hickey, underwent this in Calcutta in 1772, when she appeared “stuck up, full dressed, in a chair at the head of the best room…. three gentlemen being selected for the purpose of introducing the respective visitors, male and female.”  Curtseys and salutations were exchanged in this way from seven in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, for three days running.  It was, William  wrote, “a disagreeable and foolish ceremony”, with more than a whiff of the meat market about it, but one that was in vogue for several more decades.  

Charlotte herself must have faced the marathon with more than a twinge of apprehension.  She was neither a lady, nor in fact Mrs Hickey, but a notorious London courtesan, Charlotte Barry, who had travelled to India with her protector and, as many women like her would do, had magically re-invented herself somewhere on the high seas.  

Courtesans were, of course, nothing new in India.  The so-called  white Mughals – as certain thoroughly ‘Indianized’ EIC officials have become known – are often described as having taken Indian wives, but in the vast majority of cases these were actually ‘bibis’ or mistresses. There was no sense in which these Indian ‘wives’ could, or would want to play a part in the kind of society that the English had in mind.  

Far from keeping themselves snobbishly aloof, British women frequently lamented how hard it was to meet their Indian sisters.  One of the many culture shocks that they experienced was the startling discovery that all Indian women at this period, Hindu and Moslem alike, except for the very lowliest servant castes, observed purdah.  Purdah women lived secluded lives in their own special quarters, completely segregated from all men except from their closest male relatives.   Very few English women were privileged to cross this divide, and when they did so, there were perplexities on both sides.  Fanny Parkes, an eccentric free spirit from Wales, who travelled alone and extensively throughout India in the early 19th  century,  described how she had to wait four years before she was able to meet any Indian women other than her own servants.  Later, becoming friends with many high-ranking zenana ladies, she reflected on the cultural differences that kept them apart.   Quite apart from English women’s shocking insistence on flaunting themselves in public, many of the accomplishments that they held so dear were regarded as completely degrading.  “Music is considered disgraceful for a lady of rank, dancing the same – such things are left to nautch-women,” Parkes wrote.  

Nautch women – a courtesan class, but highly-respected for their musical and poetic abilities – were among the very few Indian women who could appear freely in mixed society.  In the 1780’s Elizabeth Plowden met the celebrated diva, Khanum Jan, in Lucknow, with whom she formed an extraordinary musical collaboration.  An accomplished musician herself, Mrs Plowden was able to transpose Jan’s songs into European notation, and the resulting ‘Hindustani Airs’ became all the rage in British drawing rooms.  In recognition of this mutually creative partnership, the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, bestowed the title of begum on Mrs Plowden, the exquisitely decorated and gilded ferman for which is still held in the British Library.

At the same time as Begum Plowden and Khanum Jan were making music together, the EIC was at war.  Robert Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 was only the first in half a century of almost continuous warfare.  While the EIC would eventually emerge victorious, with vast amounts of land under its control, these were frightening, vulnerable times for the women who lived through them.  

Eliza Fay was one of two Englishwomen taken hostage by Haider Ali, the ruler of Mysore, when their ship arrived in Calicut, in south   India, in 1779.  Unceremoniously dragged onto shore by Indian sepoys, Mrs Fay and her husband were stripped of all their possessions apart from three watches that he had the presence of mind to conceal in his wife’s elaborate headpiece.   Sitting for many hours, shivering and soaked to the skin, while the Governor of Calicut sat “feasting his eyes” on his prisoners, Mrs Fay suddenly became aware of a ticking sensation on her scalp.  The pin that her husband had stuck into one of the watches to stop it working, had come loose.  “Never shall I forget what a terrible sensation the ticking of the watch caused!  I think had it continued long I must completely have lost my senses; for I dared not remove it, from fear of worse consequences.”  

After three months in captivity, and several failed attempts to escape dressed as a French seaman, Eliza Fay eventually made it to safety in Calcutta, where she went on to become an enterprising milliner and cloth merchant, learning both shorthand and double-entry book-keeping along the way.  In this, she was not at all unusual.  While marriage may have remained women’s principal desideratum, it did not stop them from succeeding in an astonishing variety of careers and business ventures.  They worked as traders, actresses, portrait-painters, dress-makers, shop-keepers, lady’s maids and governesses; they opened schools and orphanages, ran bakeries, confectionary shops, boarding houses, and millinery establishments. Later, they would also flourish as teachers, doctors, nurses and school inspectors.  Others found unlooked for opportunities as travellers, naturalists, collectors, botanists, patrons of the arts and writers.  

By the turn of the 19th century, however, there was a palpable shift in British attitudes.  The EIC was now de facto ruler of most of the subcontinent: from being lowly immigrants, the British were now the overlords of a conquered people.  In addition, and perhaps even more disastrously for Anglo-Indian relations, the rise of the Evangelical Christian movement in England would radically change the way Indians were viewed.  Missionaries, many of them female, who had until now been banned from India (bad for business) were now given free reign under the renewed EIC charter of 1813.  Among the very first was a single woman, the Baptist Miss Ann Chaffin, who hurried there almost as soon as the ink on the charter was dry.  

From being admired as the possessors of some of the most exquisite art and philosophy the world had ever seen, Indians were increasingly viewed as idol-worshiping heathens, ripe for conversion.  This pernicious new mind-set coincided with a surge in the numbers of women who were able to travel to India, a conflagration of events which proved disastrous, not only to their posthumous reputations, but also to their very lives.   

By mid-century, India was ripe for revolt.  During the uprisings of 1857-58, many hundreds of women and children lost their lives – and were avenged by the British with equal savagery.  One of the bloodiest massacres occurred at the military cantonment at Kanpur (Cawnpore), during which 73 women, and 124 children were butchered by five assassins wielding tulwars, curved swords.   Later, a scrap of paper was found among the blood-soaked detritus.  It had belonged to a young woman, Caroline Lindsay, who had herself been among the victims. On it she had written these stark words:

Entered the barracks May 21st 

Cavalry left June 5th

First shot fired June 6th

Aunt Lilly died June 17th

Uncle Willy died June 18th

Left barracks June 27th

George died June 27th

Alice died July 9th

Mama died July 12th

British imperialism has cast a long shadow.   While it remains true that prejudice of every kind – racial, social, imperial, religious – clouded many aspects of women’s involvement in India, this was not invariably the case.  Their testaments reveal an astonishing range of responses to India, and show that theirs is a longer, more complex, and more fascinating story than we have ever thought.  They saw death and suffering, but they saw marvels too.  Whatever their fate, none of the women who went to India could fail to be changed by it.  

                               *      *      *

This article first appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine, April 28th, 2019

Katie Hickman’s ‘She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen:  British Women in India 1600 – 1900’ is published by Virago. 

Katie Hickman is the author of eight books, including two bestselling works of non-fiction, Daughters of Britannia – in the Sunday Times bestseller lists for 10 months and a 20-part series for BBC Radio 4 – and Courtesans. She has also written a trilogy of historical novels – the Aviary Gate, The Pindar Diamond and the House of Bishopgate – which have been translated into 20 languages.

Katie will be at Chalke Valley History Festival on Monday 24th June to tell the incredible stories of the first British women to set foot in India. Tickets are available here.

🎧 INDIA’S JOAN OF ARC: THE INDIAN MUTINY AND ITS HEROINE, THE RANI OF JHANSI

/in , /by

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival 2016.
In 1857, the Indian army mutinied and spread terror across the sub-continent, massacring men, women and children of the Raj. One of its leaders was a charismatic queen whose rebellion seemed justified by her tragic life. James Heneage tells her remarkable story, and the story of the Mutiny, the worst of Imperial crises.