by Anita Anand
* * *
* A length of ankle-length material pleated at the front and tied around the waist.
CHAPTER 18
CURIOUS CASE
Kassid did not know it, but at around the same time the photograph was taken, during one of his inexplicable disappearances from Sunam, Udham was trying to get himself out of India. In March 1933,1 he travelled to Lahore to acquire a new, clean passport, knowing he had no chance of getting to England without one.
Three of his aliases were dead to him now. ‘Sher Singh’ was a registered Ghadar gun-runner, ‘Frank Brazil’ was likewise useless – the fake Puerto Rican sailor was known both to the American and British authorities. Luckily for Udham, Tara Singh, his old orphanage friend at the brothel, had only given the police his nickname,‘Ude Singh’, when they stormed Madame Nur Jehan’s in 1927. He now counted on the notion that they did not have ‘Udham Singh’ on their radar yet. It was a risk: the names were so similar and he did not really know what the police had found out about him in the course of their investigation. If caught making a passport application while attempting to hide such a serious criminal record, he would land himself right back in jail.
His ‘born-again’ orphanage name ‘Udham Singh’ had a credible provenance and paper trail behind it. If the consul in Lahore made enquiries about it, they would find a real person, remembered fondly by those who had run the orphanage. Besides, he had little choice. Udham could hardly go to his Ghadar contacts and ask for one of the multiple identities they used to ferry people to and from England, not when there was even the possibility that he was still under surveillance. A known arms smuggler who had expressed his desire to kill British people, Udham certainly merited and believed he had unwanted eyes watching him. The holy man disguise he had used in Kashmir and Sunam had been Udham’s attempt to shake off shadows.
Udham’s high-stakes risk paid off. Though they would later berate themselves for the laxity of their own checking, the British granted applicant ‘Udham Singh’ a fresh, clean passport, ‘number 52753’,2 on 20 March 1933.3 He was now free to get to England and hunt down Michael O’Dwyer, just as soon as his body was strong enough.
Not only did Udham need to regain his strength, he needed guns, bullets and money. Cash was his immediate imperative. Without it he would not be able to pay for his passage on a ship bound for Europe. There was also the question of board and lodging when he got to England. Last time, when he washed up on British shores with Pritam Singh, Udham had learned to his cost that a man of no means could end up on the floor of a gurdwara for months. Such a place, with its total lack of privacy, was an impossible operational base for a would-be assassin. Preparation would be everything this time. He might only have one chance. He had to make it count.
The gaps between Udham’s visits to Sunam grew wider after he got his passport from Lahore. It is likely that he was arranging for funds through his old Ghadar contacts, though we have no proof. Kassid did not know exactly where his friend was going for weeks at a time, but that was not unusual. It was in Udham’s nature to go missing, but Kassid always expected him to come back. Then, one day, Udham left for good. The next time Kassid would hear about Udham Singh, he would be in England. The news, however, would be far from encouraging.
Udham Singh reached London sometime in late 1934,4 having embarked on a circuitous route that took over four months. It saw him travelling though Italy, Switzerland, Austria and France.5 When later questioned by police, he never convincingly accounted for how he paid for such a ‘grand tour’, let alone the car he purported to have been driving. Nor did he say who he was meeting, where he stayed, or what he did.6 Subsequent travels would suggest a strong possibility that Udham, funded by the Ghadars, may have circled through Russia before making his way to England. He knew the Bolsheviks helped Indian revolutionaries; whether they would help a man with a personal grudge was a different matter. It is also possible that the Ghadars, in exchange for their continuing patronage, had asked him to do some work for them en route to London.
Whoever Udham contacted on his European adventure, he certainly seems to have miraculously arrived in England loaded with cash, enough to pay for rent at a number of locations and a motorbike.
London was just as noisy, hectic and overwhelming as it had been a decade before. But Udham was a very different man compared to Pritam Singh’s chaperone in the 1920s. He had local knowledge, a few contacts through the Sikh gurdwara, a more than competent grasp of English, and a suitcase full of Western clothes. He also had money in his pocket and the wherewithal to become anyone he needed to be. The money probably came from his Ghadar brothers. Despite his carelessness and arrest for gun-running in 1927, the Ghadars of America would keep faith in him till the very end, even when everyone else cut him off.
Udham had told consular officials that he would be staying in Canterbury, Kent,7 where he intended to work as a ‘sports outfitter’. It was a respectably bland profession and Udham must have appeared appropriately non-descript in his passport interview. However, when he did finally reach England, instead of making his way to Canterbury, Udham went directly to London, and it was here that he first came into contact with Nayyar and Sons, a vast, Indian-owned warehouse based in east London.
In the heart of the capital’s rag-trade district, Nayyar and Sons acted as a clothing distributor for a variety of different salesmen, but also something of a neural synapse for a nationwide web of Sikh peddlers. It was a perfect hub for Udham, made up of people who could tell him about the country, where to get the things he needed and, most importantly of all, how to find people. Udham’s American adventure had taught him much about the value of networks. Not only did his fellow countrymen support him through lean times in the United States, the more idealistic among them could be converted to his cause. If anything, the Punjabis in London seemed even more receptive.
England in the 1920s and ’30s had seen a slow but steady influx of Punjabi men. With low wages and high unemployment in postwar India, they had come looking for jobs, following the slipstream of those who had fought in the war and returned with stories of Vilayat.* Unlike their soldier brothers, however, these later immigrants were often greeted with overt racism. Irish workers had experienced ‘mainland’ hostility for decades. Indians who wore their foreignness in their pigmentation were even less welcome.
Early Punjabi migrants tired of having doors slammed in their brown faces. Some returned home dejected, poorer for their failed punt on England. Others applied for pedlars’ licences. Self-employed, they could earn money buying cheap stock in bulk from warehouses. They would then spend days on the road, selling door to door. Light, foldable clothing was best as it was non-perishable and easy to store in small, cramped living spaces. Bundles could double as bedding if necessary.
The luckiest pedlars had bicycles, but most relied simply on a sturdy pair of shoes. It was a difficult way to earn a living, and many lived hand-to-mouth existences. Bonds of brotherhood developed between these men, and they often shared addresses, sleeping many to a room, rolling back their bedding to make room for communal meals on the floor.
At a time when Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists were giving voice, and sometimes more aggressive expression, to xenophobia, the risk of violence was never far away. The pedlars bandaged each other up and supported each other financially and emotionally, providing a ready-made pool of assistance and intelligence for someone like Udham Singh to exploit.
He dived headlong into their world, convincing them that he was part of their tribe, inculcating himself into the lives of various groups in different locations. Udham always had a rare gift of making people feel special. Those who struggled most in their lives would always be particularly drawn to him.
Gurbachan Singh had lost his brother and sister in 1903 to the plague in Punjab and, as was the custom among his people, he had been expected to marry his late brother’s fiancée. In rural areas of northern India, a ‘widowed’ woman, even if she had only been e
ngaged, rarely found another family to take her in, and it often fell to a younger brother to take on the responsibilities of his deceased sibling.
Having done his duty, Gurbachan and his wife went on to have five sons and two daughters, too many for a meagre ten acres to support. He struggled to do his best and please his parents, but by 1935, life was getting too difficult. Now in his mid-thirties, for the first time in his life, Gurbachan decided to make choices of his own. England would give him the wage he needed to support his family.
Though his mother begged her only surviving child to stay, Gurbachan’s mind was made up. He told his family he would only be gone for a short while, to earn enough to make them proud, enough to give his wife and children the future they deserved. Returning Indian soldiers had made it sound so easy. England was a country of opportunity. Nobody went hungry or died of plague in Vilayat. There were factories and jobs.
Like many who had gone before him, when he arrived in London, Gurbachan found the reality impossibly different. ‘The English did not give jobs to men who looked like him,’8 his grandson remembered ruefully years later. ‘It was hard and often he was hungry in those early days.’9
Out of pocket but undeterred, he looked for other ways to earn money. It was not long before some of his fellow countrymen introduced him to the Nayyar brothers.
The Nayyars gave him a bundle of clothes and advised him to travel to Dover, where there was less competition than in London. For the next year, Gurbachan spent six days a week hawking his wares door to door in the coastal town, and one day a week laying out his things in Dover’s open-air market, hoping to make enough sales to get him home with honour.
Life was hard and, though money was coming in, it was not coming in fast enough. Gurbachan had to contend with loneliness as well as disappointment in Dover. The realisation that it might take longer than he first thought to make his fortune dawned on him after a year of hard grafting. He decided to return to the capital, where at least there were people who reminded him of home.
Gurbachan had grown in confidence and ambition during his time in Dover, giving him the self-belief to do things his own way. Refusing to live in one of the crowded pedlar houses, he instead rented a small room in east London’s Aldgate, next to the Brooke Bond tea factory. Arthur Brooke’s company was the largest tea distributor in the world, taking leaves grown on the slopes of Assam and Darjeeling in India and turning them into Britain’s favourite hot beverage. Brooke was a respected employer, whose word was said to be his bond – hence the name of his brand, ‘Brooke Bond tea’.
The East End of London was filled with run-down commercial property and slum housing crammed with the working poor. It had always played host to hopeful immigrants: first the Huguenots, escaping from religious persecution in France; then the Irish, who came to escape starvation; and finally the Ashkenazi Jews, fleeing the pogroms in eastern Russia.
From the early 1900s, Indians jostled for space too. Lascars, the Indian seamen who worked on ships carrying cargo from India, first drifted in from the docks, putting down shallow roots in the grime. Many had little choice. Their masters on the shipping lines sometimes refused to pay them, cutting them loose without enough money to get back home. It was a transient, desperate life for many, but others dug in deeper, determined to change their fortunes. The lascars were joined by economic migrants in the 1920s and ’30s who formed pocket enclaves, clustered around factories and warehouses where few others wanted to live.
It was here, in the East End, that Gurbachan first met Udham Singh, and an immediate and deep friendship was formed. Gurbachan later told his grandson: ‘He was tall and handsome and very funny. Perhaps the funniest bloke he knew in those days.’10
As Gurbachan remembered it:
Pedlars from all over London would gather one day a week for a meal at one of our places. We would all make something different and end up creating a feast between us. Udham always came to these get-togethers and he stood out. Partly because of his stories, he had so many stories. Partly because he was so well dressed, and partly because of his hair. The rest of us Sikhs all kept our long hair and wore turbans, but he was the only Sikh I knew who had short hair.
And he had stuff! Stuff we could only dream of. He had a motorbike and a car. A car! In those days! It was amazing. The rest of us had so little. I had been there for a whole year, worked hard, done well, and I couldn’t afford a bicycle till much later.11
Despite the disparity in their finances, Gurbachan and Udham grew close and started to spend time together away from the group:
He used to talk about Bhagat Singh a lot. Used to say he was his hero. He would also say that one day he was going to do something even bigger than Bhagat – something he would be remembered for. One day, when we were talking about the things Bhagat Singh had done he said – ‘Friend, Bhagat was great – but he will seem like a Pind di Billi, a village cat, when you compare it to what I have planned. I will be jungle da sher in comparison, a lion in the jungle . . . You just see what I do . . . just wait.12
Gurbachan let most of what Udham said wash over him. ‘He was such a big talker all the time, about everything. He told me once that he had killed a policeman in India. I don’t think I believed half of what he said.’13
Things seemed to be falling into place nicely for Udham. However, on 5 July 1934 he did something that almost derailed his mission entirely. Just months after his arrival in London, Udham applied for endorsements to his passport which would allow him to visit Germany, Belgium, Poland, Russia and Turkey. It was a route, he claimed, that would get him back to India.14 Everything about the application should have set off alarm bells. Why would a man who had just come to England, supposedly to set up a business in Canterbury, be leaving so soon? Why would he take one of the least direct routes possible in order to get home? Ships sailed directly for India all the time. The address Udham had provided on his application form was not the same as his declared Canterbury address. Instead, Udham now claimed to be living at 30 Church Lane, east London. If any of the consular staff had cared to check, they would have realised this was in fact the address for the Nayyar Brothers warehouse, not a place fit for habitation.
More importantly, the list of countries Udham provided for endorsement sounded bizarrely reckless. His itinerary contained states already hostile to Britain, and others that were on the verge of becoming enemies.
Turkey still bubbled with anti-British resentment after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the war. Soviet Russia, which Britain had only recognised in 1933, had Stalin at the helm, and he was busily encouraging Indian insurgency just as Lenin had before him. Hitler’s Germany was the object of a secret report by the British Defence Requirements Committee in which Germany was called the ‘ultimate potential enemy’. It called for an expeditionary force of five mechanised divisions and fourteen infantry divisions to remain ready for action against the Reich.15
Besides the glaring geo-political tensions, Germany hardly seemed the kind of place a tourist of Udham’s colour should want to visit on a personal level either. The country’s Rassenpolitisches Amt, or Racial Policy department, had made Herr Hitler’s ideas on Aryan supremacy clear to the world earlier that same year. German Jews had been barred from employment and attacks on non-white people, especially Indians in Berlin, were becoming more frequent: ‘Indians reported numerous racist attacks by children on the street, such as being pelted with stones or taunted as “Negroes”. In the opinion of Indian writers, it was “the present race propaganda in the schools and universities of Germany” that was generating a feeling of hatred towards all Indians.’16
The outward hostility to Jews and non-whites was only part of the story. Unknown to any but the security services (or Indians who had secret business with the Germans themselves), the Reich’s Foreign Intelligence officials were involved in an internal tussle with colleagues in the Ministry of the Interior. The two branches of German government were trying to reconcile their Führer’s racial purity
ideas with their own pragmatic need to foster relations with anti-colonial groups undermining the British Empire.
While Udham applied for an endorsement to visit their country, the inward- and outward-looking departments of the German government had just about settled on a form of words allowing the Nazis to remain true to the doctrine of ‘lesser races’ and their attempts to destabilise the Britain: ‘The application of the principle of race . . . must not lead to despair advantageous foreign-policy results if they stand in no relation to the beneficial domestic result.’17
Why exactly did Udham feel the need to risk travelling to these turbulent countries when he was so close to Sir Michael? Could it be that, though desperate to get on with his task, he was running out of cash, and needed to make personal collections from hostile forces on the Continent? It would later transpire that Udham was maintaining multiple addresses around England, all of which required some rental contribution. It is also possible that his friends in the United States expected him to perform certain duties in exchange for their continuing financial support. We know that Indian nationalists like Chempakaraman Pillai, alias Venkat, part of the so-called Hindu German Conspiracy of 1914, were still using Berlin as their base. The Ghadars would have needed men to deliver and collect messages on their behalf.