Paradise Lost Se
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PARADISE LOST ? Jim Markland 2 August 2018 Preface Over many years a long and deep relationship was carved out between Cheltenham and British India. Investigating this can be a fascinating and rewarding experience. The many connections that resulted provide portals to what at times was the colourful exotic world of Mughals and Maharajahs and, at others, one in which great adventures and sometimes dreadful tragedies unfolded. The story here is hopefully a useful starting point for anyone wishing to explore those paths. Welcome to a world long gone! Here the term Anglo-Indian is used for consistency with some older usage to denote British people who served in India. In India that same term could be used to denote people of mixed race. India of course, in the context of this document, means a territory far larger than the current boundaries of that country. Hiding in Plain Sight So much of our history happened overseas. That is true, however, unlike some of its former colonies, Britain has never been good at remembering those who served overseas. As far as Cheltenham is concerned overseas means one place in particular …. India …and with that The Honourable East India Company; an organisation whose tentacles, at times, reached across all the oceans from New England to Nootka Sound. Yet Cheltenham, indeed, seems to have done its best to forget those many Anglo- Indians, distinguished or otherwise, who came to take its waters as a restorative, to sojourn or to live in the town whether during the times of the Company or later during the Raj. Whilst it might be unreasonable to expect a display of encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the British who lived and worked in India, as I once witnessed on an Indian edition of ‘Mastermind’, it is perhaps surprising that such history is to a large extent simply ignored today in this town that was once dubbed an ‘Anglo-Indian Paradise’, second only to London in the number of Anglo-Indian residents. Cheltenham, ‘Calcutta in the Cotswolds’, a town where like-minded Anglo-Indian families could socialise and intermingle and where ‘all - or, at any rate, very many - good Anglo-Indians go before they die’. Cheltenham became synonymous with India. The ‘nabobs’ brought their money and perhaps their servants, seeking to emulate their grand lives in India; some sent their children to be educated, others just brought meagre pensions and had to make do. The town developed at the height of Empire and there are many hugely fascinating tales, often military and sometimes inter-linked, surrounding the Anglo-Indians who visited, lived in and retired to Cheltenham. Whilst the East India Company received its Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth in the year 1600, the most engaging period was probably that when the Company held sway in India; the 100 years or so commencing with the 1757 Battle of Plassey and ending with the Mutiny and the Company’s demise. That was the time of swashbuckling, sometimes rapacious, adventures when the big names of history were made and which more or less coincided with the rise and fall of Cheltenham’s Spas and, through them, the development of the town’s wonderful architecture. Bengal, in particular, was the ‘Paradise of Hondoostan’. There, great fortunes were to be made. It was during this period that the notorious Cheltenham born nabob Paul Benfield made and lost a spectacular his fortune. Initially the steady trickle of returning Anglo-Indians, with a need to recover from prolonged periods in the subcontinent, would have made a ready market for the promoters of Cheltenham’s Pump Rooms. From its early days as a fashionable place to recuperate, Cheltenham became a desirable place to visit, for entertainment and to retire. The Anglo-India presence continued well into the 20th Century far beyond the development of the town and the decline of the Spa trade and was as much a part of Cheltenham’s story as the remarkable Regency and neo-classical architecture and the Spas themselves. In the same way as when I walk into town through Lansdown and Montpellier or Bayshill, it is nigh on impossible not to pass a multitude of grand Grade II* (and up!) listed buildings of the East India Company era, it is hard to escape meeting the ghosts of those colonials and military men who once occasioned some of those spaces and bringing to mind their stories. I start near the beautiful Christchurch, built for the residents of the Lansdown estate and nearby Alstone. Lansdown and surrounding areas became the British base for many Anglo-Indian families, several, such as the Gaitskells, being rooted both in Cheltenham and India. Many of the church pews were rented to such families. A coincidence maybe but the pinnacles of Christchurch in Shimla do show a remarkable resemblance to those of Christchurch in Cheltenham. A fine collection of memorials to many who served in India is to be found in the church including a particularly poignant one to Captain Christopher Codrington, a casualty of that fatal First Anglo-Afghan War. There are reminders of the Vellore Mutiny, and the Anglo-Maharatta and Anglo-Sikh Wars. Others commemorate illustrious careers such as those of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Sheehy Keating, who distinguished himself in the Mauritius campaign and Lieutenant General Thomas Fiddes whose service in Java and Burmah is recorded. In 1881 the Reverend Robert Pargiter performed a baptism in the church in the medium of the Tamil language. Ruth, an ayah from Madras, and who had accompanied Colonel and Mrs Rowlandson from India, was the recipient. Proceeding towards town I might recall Lieutenant Colonel Charles Pratt Kennedy, the founder of Shimla, the ‘Cheltenham of the Indian Presidencies’, who retired to live at 13, Lansdown Crescent and was buried in the New Cemetery. Nearby, in a house in Lansdown Terrace and marked by a blue plaque, lived Surgeon General William George Nicholas Manley VC who served with the Quetta field force in the Second Anglo- Afghan War. The construction of Lansdown Terrace having earlier been financed by the East India Company for its retirees. Another local resident who was well known in the town, Lieutenant General Sir William Samson Whish, commanded the 1st Brigade of Horse Artillery at the second Siege of Bharatpur. His involvement in campaigns against the Sikhs in the Punjab, where he commanded the Multan Field Force, engaged the attention of the ‘Cheltenham Looker-On’, the social media of the day for the gentry. One of the sons of Sir Charles Henry Darling, former governor of the Australian Colony of Victoria and resident of Lansdown Place, pursued a military career much of which was spent in India. A large percentage of the homes in Lansdowne, Montpellier and elsewhere played sometime host to often sizeable Anglo-Indian families. Extensive Mews for the horses, carriages and, presumably, storage of sedan chairs lay behind many of the large terraces which were also furnished with quarters for governesses, servants and ayahs. Such households in Cheltenham would, however, have had to manage with a far smaller compliment of servants than in India. Lieutenant General Richard Tickell of the Bengal Engineers, whose memorial appears in Christchurch, came with his wife, five sons and two daughters, mother-in-law, butler and five other servants. Some families, such as the Prinseps, were very prominent in Anglo-Indian Society. Lauriston House, for example, became the home of surgeon Thomas Richardson Colledge who, on qualifying, joined the Company’s service in China where he founded the Medical Missionary Society. In Montpellier I might be prompted to wonder whether the forerunner of the present Pump Room was the one where Major-General Arthur Wellesley, fresh from the Army in India where he had both defeated Tipu Sultan in the Anglo-Mysore Wars and shone in the Battle of Assaye, rescued the Vicomtesse de Gontaut-Biron’s new ill-fitting garter on leaving the salon. Wellesley, later to become the Duke of Wellington and then Prime Minister, was to visit and reside in Cheltenham on several occasions. Just before his first coming to Cheltenham he had his one and only meeting with Admiral Lord Nelson. General Richard Podmore, whose grave is in Leckhampton, served at Seringapatnam, one of the famous battles where Wellington played a role. Before I reach the once splendid Montpellier Arcade where in Mr Brown’s Coffee and Cigar Divan one might have enjoyed the fragrance of ‘Indian weed’, I pass the former Mr Davies’s Montpellier Library, publisher of the ‘Looker-On’, which adjoined the Montpellier Rotunda. During the Indian Mutiny, Cheltenham most eagerly awaited the ‘Looker-On’s’ reports of the dispatches carried by the Overland Mail for this was a very worrying time. The Montpellier Walk is also where the well-known Bick Brothers once plied their trade as Portmanteau, Trunk and Bag Manufacturers specialising in Indian and Colonial Outfits, Tin and Air Tight Cases and Officers Barrack Furniture. Turning around briefly, looking back towards Rotunda Circus, the caryatids of Montpellier Walk bring the wilful Lieutenant Colonel Kendal Coghill to mind, his flogging as a College lad for painting the statues of those ‘armless ladies red, blue and green; his participation in the storming of the Kashmir Gate during the Mutiny and his amputating fellow Cheltenham College pupil Edmund Warrand’s severely wounded arm with a penknife, throwing the severed arm into a ditch. Coghill was to receive Bahadur Shah Zafa, the last Mughal Emperor, as his prisoner. The memoirs of Colonel Edward Vibart, some-time resident of Cheltenham, provided some of the best observations of the violence that took place at Delhi.