by Anita Anand
He earned $54 a week,22 a fabulous wage by his previous standards, but, then again, everything seemed better in America. Where Britain had seemed grey and tetchy, America was vibrant and confident. This was the roaring twenties, a time of sustained and unprecedented economic prosperity in the United States. Cities thrummed with jazz music and the place was awash with beautiful women in revealing flapper dresses.
America made everything seem within reach. The pin-up of the era was Babe Ruth, a reform-school boy turned baseball god. He was a hero to the downtrodden and disadvantaged, as well as the Ivy-League educated. America was a place built on shattered caste.
Slowly but surely, Udham was becoming seduced by America. He was a handsome man in his mid-twenties, broad-shouldered, with a thick head of hair and intense dark brown eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled, which was often. It was no surprise that he attracted female attention. His friend Jawand Singh was already married to a Mexican woman, Josefina Torres,23 and it appears that not long after he arrived Udham followed suit, falling in love with a woman eight years his senior. He would describe her as his ‘American girl’,24 and we only know her name because he was forced to give it to interrogators, as we shall see. Despite intense questioning, they barely got more than her name from him, but ‘Lupe’* is enough to trace her light footsteps through this chapter of Udham’s life.
Lupe25 Singh, as she would become, was, according to Udham, the daughter of ‘zimindars’, the Punjabi word for landowners. A search of naturalisation, census and birth records show one single ‘Lupe Singh’ registered at the time Udham was in America and supposedly falling in love.
Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Lupe Hernandez spent much of her childhood in El Paso, with her parents Guadalope and Concepcion Hernandez.26 They owned a little farmland, which would have made them zimindars in Udham’s mind, and their geographical location would have put Lupe firmly in his orbit as he ferried smuggled Indians from the border for the Ghadars.
Now a married man, in 1925 Udham had to find a better-paying job to support them both. He started working for the Harbour Boatbuilding Company in east San Pedro,27 which took his wages from $54 to $66 a week.28 The company provided accommodation, too, and for the first time in his life he seemed to have a stable and happy existence. Udham had a home, a job, friends and a woman who loved him. But then, quite suddenly in late 1926, something changed to shake Udham out of his reverie.
Through his friend Sudagar Singh, Udham met a man in San Pedro whom he would later simply refer to as ‘Lallo’.29 Though Lallo described himself as a longshoreman, Udham suspected he was an informer for the immigration department.30 Such men were paid by the American authorities to keep track of both illegal immigrants and politicised Punjabis who might be involved in Ghadar activity. Almost as soon as Lallo came into his life, Udham decided it was time to leave. He made Lupe pack up their things, quit his job and moved to Long Beach, more than 50 miles south-west of Claremont on the coast.31
If lemons and learning defined Claremont, Long Beach was all about commerce and calumny. Long Beach’s most famous son was the 300-pound silent movie star Rosco ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. At a raucous three-day party five years earlier, a young starlet had died mysteriously in Arbuckle’s company. Newspapers had gone wild with the story, alleging that ‘Fatty’ had killed Virginia Rappe with his weight while savagely raping her. Though he was later acquitted of the crime, the scandal clung to his home town and was regularly trotted out in the newspapers.
When Udham arrived, another Long Beach scandal was dominating the news. A ‘local couple’s honeymoon’ ended abruptly when the bride fell from a cliff to her death. It transpired that her husband was a serial bigamist who had left behind seven wives and a ‘climax of death’. Residents pored over the salacious copy, while their home town blossomed around them.
Oil had been recently discovered on nearby Signal Hill and an unprecedented building boom followed. A new commercial harbour was opening just as Udham and Lupe arrived, bringing in money from land and by sea. Streets extended quickly all around the newlyweds and, in anticipation of a deal with Fox Films, a new radio station called KFOX made its debut broadcast, just in time to cover the inaugural flight of a locally engineered aeroplane. ‘The Douglas’ would be the first plane to circumnavigate the earth. By coming to Long Beach, Udham had moved to one of the most happening cities in the whole of the United States.
Work was abundant in the boomtime, and Udham found a job at the Douglas Aircraft Company.32 The factory produced civilian planes, torpedo bombers and reconnaissance planes for the US navy. Such was the sensitivity of work, company policy only allowed for the hiring of naturalised Americans. With the help of his new Ghadar friends, Udham, an Indian subject of the Raj and an illegal immigrant to boot, decided to become someone else entirely. Frank Brazil, the Puerto Rican Punjabi, was born.
Udham would not be the first among his countrymen to use the name ‘Frank Brazil’, but he would be the last. According to naturalisation documents, a Francisco Jose Brazil, aka Frank Brazil, born on 19 September 1899 in the Portuguese Azores, applied for American naturalisation in December 1920. His official papers described him as a heavy man, 5 feet 6 inches and 170 pounds, with dark hair, dark eyes, a scar on his upper lip and another on the second finger of his left hand. In the box for his occupation, Frank described himself as a dairyman33 and told immigration officials that he wished to make America his new home. He also wanted to change his profession and work on the shipping lines.
After an obligatory year of official processing, Frank got his wish in 1921 when he was officially naturalised. Four of his five children would be born in Stockton, California, where he would live a long and happy life with his American-born wife Mary. Stockton also happened to play host to one of the most active Ghadar hubs in the whole of North America. The gurdwara there was home to the Khalsa Diwan, the governing body of all Sikhs in America, and it regularly hosted incendiary Ghadar speakers who spoke out against British rule in India. It was to Stockton that the Ghadars summoned supporters with their now-infamous ‘Clarion Call for the Ghadar Army’ in 1914, asking for an army to sign up and fight the British: ‘No more petition to the oppressors. Now we have to take our rights with sword!’34
The Ghadars were after men and money:
Come brothers, you have earned plenty of dollars! Take the ship back to our motherland! Come let us go back to our motherland and raise the banner of revolt! Come to the gathering in Stockton and take a vow to go back to Hindustan and fight in the Ghadar! Just as this call is written in blood in the same fashion the letter of freedom will be written in ours and the blood of the British on the soil of Hindustan.35
Cash had rolled into Stockton ever since. As fast as it did, seditious material rolled out, printed under Har Dayal’s direction and shipped all over the world. The real Portuguese Frank Brazil may not have cared a jot about clarion calls or destroying the Raj, but, for a price, he seemed to be willing to loan out his identity. The Ghadars had money, and Frank Brazil had mouths to feed.
The name Frank Brazil first appeared on a crew manifest for the SS Leviathan on 29 June 1925. Ships were required to keep detailed and separate records of the ‘aliens employed on vessels as members of crew’, and the Leviathan was no exception, though she was exceptional. Seized from the Germans in 1917, the SS Vaterland had her nationality, name and sex changed by her new American owners, the International Mercantile Marine Company. Leviathan was kitted out to become the queen of the fleet, one of the largest and fastest passenger ships in the world. She regularly ferried more than a thousand passengers to and from England in a voyage that took around a week. She would find herself crewed by a variety of Frank Brazils.
The ‘Frank Brazil’ who arrived in New York from Southampton on the Leviathan on 8 June 1925 was described as weighing 157 pounds, much lighter than the naturalised Portuguese man who had arrived five years earlier and applied for the seaman’s permit,36 however he was roughly the same heig
ht as the one-time dairyman. The Frank Brazil who arrived in New York on 29 June also seemed to fit the man’s description, although he was much thinner. If the crew list and particulars are to be believed, he must have dropped 17 pounds in two weeks. Drastic weight loss is possible, but height changes are not.
The Frank Brazil who sailed into New York from Southampton later that year on 10 August, on the same seaman’s licence, was 5 feet 11 inches.37 Frank Brazil who arrived on 31 August was eight inches shorter and weighed only 127 pounds.38 Another Frank Brazil arrived on 21 September,39 was described as Puerto Rican, and he was followed soon after on 19 October by a Frank Brazil who was said to be a ‘Native American’.40
Putting the height, weight and nationality discrepancies to one side, either Frank Brazil was the hardest-working man in the fleet, or the Ghadars were using his identity to move men from Britain to America illegally. It was a faster, more efficient method than that used by Udham and Pritam. For a while, it worked flawlessly.
While Frank Brazils criss-crossed the Atlantic, Udham Singh’s Frank Brazil worked happily on Douglas’s noisy machine floor. There he earned a handsome wage of $75 a week,41 the biggest pay packet he had ever received. He lived in Long Beach with Lupe, and for a while he appears to have done little else than live the life of a contented man. Perhaps America had fulfilled him in a way he never expected. Perhaps happiness had finally filled the space where once only vengeance had existed. He certainly seems to have kept up his Ghadar contacts despite his domestic stability, otherwise why, after some eight months, suddenly and without explanation, would Udham quit his job again and uproot his life? We have no idea what toll this took on Lupe, but such upheaval is never easy.
Udham and his wife travelled across the country from Long Beach to Michigan, where Pritam Singh was now happily ensconced in the civil engineering department of the university. We do not know if the two men met, but we do know that Pritam had become an active part of the ‘Hindustan Club’ at the university, vocal in its opposition to the Raj.42
Udham and Lupe were heading to Detroit, but to get there they had taken the ‘Michigan Straits’.43 It was an unusual route to say the least. The journey was needlessly circuitous, taking them over land and water, and only made sense if Udham was trying to shake off or avoid unwanted attention. Lupe must have been relieved when they finally arrived at their new home. She probably assumed they would stay there for ever.
Detroit, like Long Beach, was booming in the 1920s thanks to its burgeoning automobile industry. Demand for mechanics and engineers rocketed, and unlike the Douglas Aircraft Company, where Udham had been forced to adopt the alias of Frank Brazil, in Detroit he could be himself again. Car manufacturers were none too picky about who they hired. Most employed immigrants from Canada, Greece and Italy, but two companies stood out in their willingness to hire non-white staff.
Ford and Pullman positively welcomed black workers, predominantly from the southern states, although a smattering of Punjabi émigrés also found their way into the workforce. Thanks to a mysterious friend he would later only identify as ‘Mather’,44 Udham found a job at Ford with relative ease. New to the concept of the assembly line, he started as a trainee on the factory floor. The salary was a measly $36 a week, less than half what he was making in Long Beach, but Udham had not moved to Detroit to advance his career.
He would later tell police, somewhat evasively, that ‘Mather’ was a ‘steel tester’, but that he did not know his first name. The 1920 US Federal census reveals a Prem N. Mathur living in Detroit’s Highland Park, a ‘metallurgist’ by trade who worked for a ‘motor company’.45 Udham would later be forced to admit that he too had lived in Highland Park during his time at Ford, so it seems possible, even likely considering his wage, that Prem Mathur not only got him his job, but also shared his home with Udham and Lupe. It was a magnitude of help one might expect from a Ghadar brother.
Indeed, the British had a ‘Prem Singh’ listed as a known Ghadar in their intelligence files, believed to be in the United States in 1920.46 Ghadars frequently used aliases loosely connected to their real names. Hindu converts to Sikhism often dispensed with old family names in favour of the ubiquitous ‘Singh’ surname that bound them to the religion.
Whether Prem Mathur and Prem Singh were the same person or not, it is unbelievable that Udham would not have known his benefactor’s full name. If he withheld it from the police, he must have had good reason. Udham would also never offer any explanation as to why, after just five months in Detroit, he upped sticks and moved again.
Was Udham running away from something? Had he had finally been given the green light to do something he had been longing to do? Whatever the reason, late in 1926, Udham and Lupe were on the move again, and from a brief, almost throwaway comment he would later make to police, it would seem that he and his wife already had one child and another on the way.47 If true, Udham’s decision to disrupt their domestic life would have been unbearable for Lupe. No sooner had she put down roots in a city than her husband was pulling them up again, moving her ever further from her family and all she knew. Udham’s need, however, trumped everything else. Whatever he was looking for now, he would find it only in New York.
New York in 1926 was not kind to newcomers, especially ones who looked like Udham Singh. The United States had passed a federal law two years earlier known as the Johnson– Reed Act. It introduced a raft of measures, including the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act, primarily aimed at decreasing immigration from southern Europe – countries with a Roman Catholic majority – Eastern Europe and Eastern European Jews. It also barred entry to all Arabs, East Indians and Asians; basically all non-white people from overseas. According to the US Department of State Office, the purpose of the act was ‘to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity’.48
Ellis Island, once a hub of immigration, was now more of a historical curiosity than a thriving port of ingress. Though Lady Liberty still lifted her torch above the harbour, these were dark times for dark-skinned outsiders.
‘Emberto Es Pecito’49 was the name police would eventually wrestle out of Udham when he was later forced to disclose where he had been staying in New York. He claimed that he had worked for the Italian at his workshop on ‘No. 322 East 104th Street’50 for a period of around ‘eight or nine months . . . where his pay was fixed at seventy-five dollars a week’.51 ‘Emberto Es Pecito’ does not exist in any American records of immigration, naturalisation or census, however, an Umberto Esposito, originally from Naples, did live at 401 East 105th Street,52 a block away from the workshop where Udham claimed to have been employed.
Umberto lived with his wife, Angelina, and very young family: Raphael, aged eight, Anna, aged seven, Francesco, who was five, and little Rosina, who was just a year old in 1926.53 He appears to have been a warm family man, and through him Udham met ‘several Italians, relations of Pasito’.54 Though he made no mention of children, either Umberto’s or his own, we know Udham was a man who loved the company of small children, ‘one of the few adults who would take the time to play, and who never got bored of childish stories’.55
So why would an Italian, with a family and business of his own, go out of his way not only to give Udham a job, but also a seat around his kitchen table and an introduction to those he held most dear? There were historic sympathies that existed between Italian and Indian nationalists, with the likes of both Gandhi the pacifist and Vir Savarkar, a militant nationalist dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Raj, both paying homage to the likes of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. The two Giuseppes had fought hard in word and deed for the reunification of Italy. Umberto, however, was not a man of letters. It is more likely that at first the Ghadars were somehow compensating him for easing Udham’s way in the city. He would certainly become a conduit for large sums of cash.
Umberto might have been paid for rendering a service to the Ghadar brotherhood, but it does appear a warmth developed between the two men. In New York, ju
st as in Long Beach before, Udham found himself with a home, job, family and friends, and perhaps it was enough for a while, because he appears to have lived happily in New York for almost seven months.
It would have been more than understandable for Udham, far from the reach of the Raj, living a life of peace and prosperity, to have swallowed his revenge vow and moved on with his life. But like the fairy-tale pea under a pile of mattresses, no matter how personally happy he might have been, the events of 1919 still haunted him.
The past few years had been about proving himself to the Ghadars, about working his way into their esteem. He would need their connections if he was to go back to England and succeed this time round. More than that, his association with the Ghadar resistance had given him a status he had never known before. He was part of something much bigger than himself, and that was a captivating sensation for one who had been invisible for so much of his life. As 1927 dawned, it seemed as if Udham was detaching from the life he had made for himself. Though Lupe might have hoped for so much more from her husband, his journey to New York was but a stepping stone, getting him closer to his quarry.
Every so often, Sir Michael, the proverbial pea, had been rousing him from his American dream. Finally, it seems that, in 1927, Udham had the opportunity to do something about it.
* * *
* They would write ‘Loope’ in their report, a phonetic rendering of a name they were unfamiliar with in Amritsar.
CHAPTER 15
PATRIOTS
Back in England, living at his smart apartment in London’s exclusive Prince of Wales Terrace, Sir Michael had become something of a celebrity. The bruisingly critical debates in the House of Commons had brought powerful allies rallying to his side, and he had been raking over the events of his time in office with enthusiasm ever since, touring the speaking circuit and contributing to a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Patriot, a radical right-wing weekly financed by the 8th Duke of Northumberland.