The Patient Assassin

by Anita Anand

  India does not want self-government. She does not understand it . . . Our politicians are forcing a growth in pretending to India that she is ready for home rule. It is cruel to pretend that she is now approaching the era of self-government. India will not be desirous or capable of self-government for generations, and when self-government does come, it will not be the leaders of revolt who will rule. The very names of most of the extremists smell in the nostrils of Indian manhood.19

  Dyer reserved particular bile for Gandhi. No doubt the statements the Mahatma made about him fuelled his hatred. In the wake of the Hunter inquiry, Gandhi had said of Dyer:

  His brutality is unmistakable. His abject and unsoldier-like cowardice is apparent in every line of amazing defence . . . Such a man is unworthy of being considered a soldier . . . No doubt the shooting was ‘frightful’, and the loss of innocent life deplorable. But the slow torture, degradation and emasculation that followed was much worse, more calculated, malicious and soul killing.20

  The accusation of ‘cowardice’ would have been unbearable. A younger version of himself might have punched back, however Hunter had entirely knocked the fight out of Rex Dyer.

  Sir Michael tried his best to rebuild his brigadier general. Together with a British newspaper, the Morning Post, he appealed for funds for Dyer and his family. Within weeks the coffers swelled to more than £15,000, with another £3,000 raised in Calcutta. Letters of gratitude poured into the newspapers, including one purporting to be from 679 British women in India demanding the reinstatement of Dyer: ‘As Englishwomen who know India, and the risk to the lives and honour of Englishwomen at time of rebellion . . . We appeal to you to champion our cause, which is also that of all Europeans in India, with a view to getting it [Hunter’s judgment against Dyer, and his subsequent dismissal from the army] revoked.’21

  Money for Dyer kept rolling in, and by 6 December, when the Post finally drew a line under fundraising, an extraordinary £26,317. 1s. 10d. had been raised from all over the world. Dyer refused to collect the cheque in person. Smiling and posing for a photograph seemed beyond him, and a somewhat grumpy Post editor was forced to put the cheque in the post, along with a copy of the newspaper. The headline read simply: ‘A Debt Acknowledged’.

  The collection eased Dyer’s concerns over the long-term security of his wife, Annie, and his sons, Ivon and Geoffrey, but it was scant recompense for the unrelenting bad news that seemed to plague him in England. Soon after his arrival, Dyer was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis, a disease of the arteries that greatly increases the threat of heart attack and stroke. The condition is degenerative, and it slowed Dyer down considerably. He was told by physicians to avoid stress and exercise.

  Overnight, Dyer turned from feared and fearless warrior into an invalid. To keep his mind calm, Dyer’s wife found and bought a small dairy farm for his convalescence, on the outskirts of Ashton Keynes in Wiltshire. Green and peaceful, the farm had a dual purpose. It was a place where the Dyers could shut out Jallianwala Bagh, and it would be an inheritance for his younger son Geoffrey. With Dyer’s health deteriorating by the day, the couple were forced to think about what would happen after he was gone.

  The eighteenth-century farmhouse gave Dyer exactly what he needed. High trees kept out prying eyes, and they were miles from the nearest village. Dyer even started to write his memoirs, not about India, but his time in East Persia. Riders of the Sarhad read like an adventure book for boys where he could cast himself as the hero. Publication called for a publicity tour and, in 1921, after two years in self-imposed purdah, Dyer was forced out into the world again.

  He found his public appearances taxing, even though he was invariably greeted by standing ovations. Adoring audiences supported his action in Punjab and wanted him to know it. Such affirmation should have helped to build him up, but every so often something would happen to splinter the fragments of Dyer’s already shattered spirit.

  In April 1921, an Indian student by the name of Santidas Khushiram Kirpalani was having tea at the Oxford Union with an English friend. He was one of a handful of students granted entry that year to prepare for a role in the Indian Civil Service, a direct beneficiary of Montagu’s recent reforms.

  Unlike Har Dayal and Kitchlew, Kirpalani loved his time at Balliol, made friends and fitted in well. He was a self-confessed Anglophile, yet any time Jallianwala Bagh came up, he found his affection sorely tested. That afternoon in Oxford, the massacre had come up in conversation again, and Kirpalani was so engrossed in his own anger that he did not notice a man to his side who seemed to be eavesdropping intently:

  A gentleman of soldierly bearing approached and greeted us. He was about five foot eight in height, very fair, with blue eyes, a thick moustache and a medium build. He was reserved and soft-spoken. He asked what we thought of this Jallianwala Bagh affair. It was the burning topic of the day. I tore into the subject. Indian boys generally were boiling over with rage and thought the dismissal of General Dyer was not enough and that he should have been hanged for murder.22 . . . My British friend was also very critical. All of a sudden, this gentleman stood up. His face was sad. He said quietly and distinctly: ‘I am that unfortunate man.’ Suddenly, recognition dawned on us, for his picture had been in all the papers, except that, unlike in the pictures, he was in mufti. He moved away slowly. To this day, I carry that image in my heart.23

  Dyer, so sure for so long that he had done his duty, heard himself being described as a monster, both by an Indian and one of his own. He became that same inconsolable boy who had once wept over a small, dying monkey.

  In contrast, Sir Michael would justify his actions till his dying day and fight anyone who questioned him. He never lost any sleep over what he had done, nor expressed a single regret.

  In November 1921, Reginald Dyer suffered a serious stroke that left him weak and partially paralysed. Annie decided to move her husband to an even quieter location, a small village called Long Ashton, near Bristol. The cottage was more secluded than the dairy farm and would be Dyer’s home for the next six years. Save for visits from his family, Dyer stayed in almost total seclusion, venturing out only to tend the flowers in his walled garden. At fifty-seven years of age, with his thick thatch of hair now entirely grey, and without his Indian tan, he looked like a ghost of his former self.

  CHAPTER 13

  LONDON LIMBO

  When Udham tried to get to England for the first time, he had no idea that one of his targets was dying of his own accord, but soon realised the other was rising even further out of his reach. Gandhi, for all his trying, had failed to get justice for Jallianwala Bagh, so Udham, in 1922, had taken it upon himself to hatch his own plan. It was not a very good plan, but after his return from Africa Udham seemed buoyed by a newly discovered belief in himself, one that would be eclipsed by his actual abilities.

  The idea of getting to England presented itself during one of his motorbike sorties around Punjab. Udham had met a student from Patiala, a sixteen-year-old by the name of Pritam Singh,1 and listened to his tale of sadness and frustration.2 That Udham was even mixing with young Indian students is telling. The Ghadars were always trying to enlist the help of bright young men from colleges around Punjab. Udham, with his ample charm and persuasion, would have made an ideal recruiter.

  Pritam was a shy-looking boy, with an angular face and wide, trusting eyes.3 Clever and ambitious, despite the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms, he saw no future for himself in India. He wanted to study civil engineering in America and start a new life there. Pritam said he knew of a university that might even take him, based in a place called Michigan. However, when he applied for passage to America in Lahore, he had been blocked. The travel documents issued to him would only get him as far as England. From London he would have to fight on, applying for a special endorsement to travel to America, after which he would have to battle even harder to get the Americans to let him in. The United States had been tightening its immigration laws, and Pritam found he was in the middle of a burea
ucratic nightmare. Udham saw opportunity in his new young friend’s misery.

  Though woefully unqualified himself, with no knowledge of English and no experience of the country, Udham offered to escort Pritam to London and help him sort out his problems. It was a ridiculous idea, of course. What help could a semi-literate, failed soldier and former labourer on the Uganda Railway offer? Nevertheless, Pritam, no more than a boy, seemed happy to go along with his plan. He desired companionship and Udham needed a convincing cover story if he was to travel to England unimpeded. Escorting a teenager was a plausible reason to travel to the country.

  Udham still had his clean passport from Africa, issued in the name of Sher Singh. If his leafleting and cash drops had come to the attention of the authorities, they would be looking for a rebel called Udham Singh. Sher Singh was an entirely unknown quantity.

  Passage as far as Marseilles cost 650 rupees,4 almost exactly the sum Udham had taken from the subedar, so, with his documents and the remainder of his motorbike cash in his pocket, he bought his ticket. The fact that Udham was financing his own trip would suggest that he was travelling entirely on his own initiative. There was no support for him at that time, financial or logistical, from either the Ghadars or any other nationalist group. Though he regarded them as his family, they had yet to recognise him as a worthwhile son.

  We do not know exactly when the pair set sail, but we can surmise from Pritam’s own account that they must have left sometime in the second half of 1922.5 They sailed on a ship with around forty other Indians, docked in Marseilles, stayed for two days and left for Paris by rail.6

  After a mere forty-eight hours in Paris, the pair travelled to Calais and then set sail for Dover,7leaving almost immediately from Dover to London. Udham seemed in a mighty hurry to reach the capital, but when the pair finally arrived it did not feel like the triumph he had hoped for. He knew nobody, the city was large and confusing, and Udham had no idea where Dyer or Sir Michael lived. He was entirely wrongfooted by the enormity of his task and by London itself. To add to his troubles, he had a frightened young boy to take care of. Pritam, unlike Udham, was not built for this kind of life. When Udham looked at his charge, with his unruly hair plastered down in a severe side parting, perhaps the haunted and hungry expression of his former self looked back at him.

  Indians had grown up hearing about the might and majesty of London, the seat of the empire. What Udham actually would have seen was a city gripped by anxiety and depression. The British Isles were still feeling the reverberations of Bloody Sunday, a catastrophic day of violence that had taken place in Dublin two years before. The day marked a decisive turning point in the military struggle between British forces and the IRA, and it also led to a spree of violence both in Ireland and on the mainland. At the centre of the drama was Michael Collins, an Irish republican.

  Early on Bloody Sunday, teams of killers from Collins’s ‘squad’ – a special assassination unit – visited over a dozen private addresses in the south of Dublin. By the time the capital had woken up, fourteen people were dead; eight of them were British agents, two were ‘Auxiliaries’ from the much-feared paramilitary wing of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The rest were either innocent bystanders or civilian informers. In just a few hours, British intelligence in Ireland had been crippled.

  Later that day, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary marched into a Gaelic football ground in Dublin called Croke Park, where thousands of people had gathered to watch a match. Without warning, the troops opened fire and fourteen people, including one player, were shot dead.

  Though the British government insisted their men were trying to flush out the IRA, parallels were drawn between the Irish experience and that of India. While Ireland buried its dead, the spectre of Jallianwala Bagh rose again. Reprisals followed, and in June 1922 the IRA caused outrage on the mainland when they gunned down Field Marshal Sir Henry Hughes Wilson, one of the most senior British army staff officers of the First World War, right on his London doorstep.

  The fear such audacity caused was augmented by economic depression. Numbers of British unemployed were soaring in 1922 and the coalition government led by David Lloyd George attempted to curb wages to meet post-war bills. In response, the nation’s coal miners called a strike. Such was the nation’s reliance upon coal that a state of emergency was declared soon after. Udham arrived in a land of coal rationing, jobless men and fear of terrorism. Was this really the land that produced India’s rulers?

  It was Pritam who managed to find them a place to stay, basic accommodation in the heart of the city especially set aside for Indian students.8 On the corner of Keppel Street and Gower Street, in the middle of a triangle of London colleges, the YMCA Indian Student Hostel was founded as a centre of Indo-British goodwill. It was supposed to be a place where bright young Indians and Britons could swap ideas and learn about each other, fostering ties of trust. What the founders would have made of an aspiring assassin sleeping under their roof is anyone’s guess.

  Though Pritam fitted right into the YMCA mix, Udham felt desperately out of place. With his poor education he stood out in the company of young men studying law and engineering in the nearby colleges. Spending just two nights under the Gower Street roof,9 Udham left Pritam at the YMCA and sought something that fit him better. He found Britain’s first Sikh gurdwara, which had opened its doors to men like him since 1913.10

  The terraced house at 79 Sinclair Road looked like every other house on the street. Located just behind Shepherd’s Bush Green, it was built of red brick, three stories high, and had a large bay window at the front. For a boy who had grown up in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the plain building looked as different as could be from the gilded Sikh gurdwaras he had known in India. Nevertheless, this non-descript-looking place became his lifeline in London.

  Shepherd’s Bush Gurdwara had been founded and funded by the maharajah of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh. A great ally of the British during the war, when some of his subjects raised the difficulty of finding places to pray while stationed on British soil, the maharajah took it upon himself to build somewhere for them. Such was the importance of Indian troops during the war, nobody raised an objection.

  The gurdwara became a vital link between England and home, first for Indian soldiers and then for the very early Sikh immigrants. After ten gruelling weeks at sea, they would arrive from India, often with only the address of Sinclair Road scrawled on a piece of paper. The four-bedroom house became an emergency shelter for dozens of men.

  Wherever they could find space, men would sleep on the floors, pray, and eat communal meals together. Though crowded and basic, Sinclair Road felt much more like home to Udham than Gower Street ever could, and he ended up staying there for months while Pritam repeatedly tried and failed to get his papers for America.

  As time passed and the seasons changed, it became clear to Udham that he entirely lacked the skills needed to find Sir Michael or Dyer, let alone to get close enough to kill them. His English was terrible; he was running out of money; he had no gun and no bullets, and even if he had, his disastrous stint in the army barely gave him the confidence to use them. Not for the first time in his life, Udham felt like a powerless failure.

  Over at the YMCA, Pritam was faring no better. He simply could not get the Americans to let him in, no matter how many times he banged on the consul’s door. Since his arrival in London, Pritam had been corresponding with a Professor Henry Earle Riggs at the University of Michigan* and had even been offered a place by him in the civil engineering department.11 Not that this made any difference to the American authorities, who continued to bar his entry.

  Riggs was as dismayed as Pritam at the intransigence of his government, and refused to give up hope of getting his Indian student to Michigan. At sixty-eight years of age, Riggs was a railwayman at heart who hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Riggs had relied on his pickaxe to make his way, working on the Nebraskan railroads,12 tough and icy terrain. He worked on railways, s
tudied railways and, thanks to the railways, ploughed his way into academia. When Pritam first contacted him, Professor Riggs was one of America’s foremost experts on industrial railroads.13 Perhaps Riggs saw something of himself in the struggling Pritam Singh. Whatever their connection, Riggs was not giving up on him.

  To the outside world, it looked as if Udham was as dedicated to Pritam’s dream as Riggs was in America, though when he came up with his own plan for getting Pritam to Michigan, he was not being entirely altruistic. Over the long and frustrating months that he was not able to enact his revenge, Udham had been busily establishing a network in London – befriending Sikhs who had come over to work and save, gathering as much information as he could. One of them was a man named Gurbux Singh,14 who had not only spent time in the United States, but also told him the best way to get in. Udham was advised to take Pritam as far as Mexico and reapply for permission to enter there. It was easier to push against a new door than the one that had been so repeatedly slammed in your face.

  California, Udham knew, was home to the Ghadar movement. Resigned to his limitations as an assassin, Udham was enthusiastic about this new adventure. If he could just get to America, maybe his Ghadar brothers could teach him what he needed to learn. The pair left London close to Udham’s birthday in December 1923. He was once again ready to be reborn.

  * * *

  * In his interrogation with Amritsar police in 1927, as reproduced in Sikander Singh’s Udham Singh, alias Ram Mohammed Singh Azad, p. 91, Udham said Pritam was in correspondence with a ‘Professor Riggest at Ann Arbor University’. An exhaustive search of teaching institutions in the area turned up a Professor Henry Earle Riggs at Michigan, who was indeed corresponding with a Pritam Singh who had been barred from the United States. I cannot thank the Bentley Museum enough for helping me to trace the correct professor and uncover the paper trail connecting him to Pritam Singh’s case.