by Anita Anand
Oblivious to the interest in her, Eileen was in India meeting with one of Bradley’s co-accused in the Meerut Conspiracy, a Bengali named Sibnath Banerjee, general secretary of the East Indian Railway Association. Through him Eileen was introduced to the struggle for Indian independence. It would become her lifelong obsession ever after.
Writing to her husband, whose letters were by now being intercepted by the IPI, unsealed at the sorting office, copied, resealed and sent on their way, Eileen wrote of Banerjee: ‘He was one of the Meerut people who was acquitted – that means he only spent two and a half years in prison awaiting trial and was let off for two years on bail. He was also in Russia 1921/23 – interesting times.’10
Banerjee invited Eileen to address a crowd of almost 1,000 Indian workers, and she found the experience exhilarating and profoundly moving. She begged Horace to think about relocating to India: ‘Do seriously consider how much more useful we could be here than in England – it’s a social crime for us not to come . . . TU [Trade Union] movement, where it exists, is necessarily more militant here than in England.’11
India changed Eileen’s life, and when she returned to England, perhaps with Banerjee’s endorsement, she started to work for Bradley as his secretary. Thanks to an outcry in the British press over his incarceration in India, Bradley had returned to England after being released early from prison in 1933. Eileen, like Udham in his early Ghadar career, served as a ‘mule’, carrying money and messages to Bradley’s Communist contacts around Great Britain.
She was good at what she did, a true believer. Soon, together with Bradley, Eileen was heading up the CPGB’s ‘Colonial Information Bureau’, a successor to the League Against Imperialism. The LAI had been an international, anti-imperial organisation, regarded as a front for the Soviet Comintern.
Bradley produced fiery pamphlets arguing for direct militancy, rejecting Gandhi’s non-violent strategy of non-cooperation:
The dogma of ‘non-violence’ should be omitted. The entire emphasis should be placed on the development of the mass struggle, on the work of organisation of the workers and peasants as the primary task in the field of organisation, on the active taking up of the immediate demands of the workers and peasants for their vital needs, and the linking of this struggle with the political anti-imperialist struggle.12
Eileen’s path crossed with many Indian Communists, especially those, like Udham, who had freshly returned from mystery missions to Russia. Though his name does not appear in her surveillance files, there is the suggestion that she was meeting a number of Indian insurgents and was committed to their cause. Surveillance records on Eileen Palmer would become much more detailed later in her life, as she rose inexorably up the ranks of the CPGB. By 1953, Special Branch would describe her as ‘One of the Top-Ranking Communists’ in Europe.13
Udham’s trip to Russia, his aliases, his multiple addresses, his boasts about gun-running, together with his friendship with Irene (possibly Eileen) Palmer, earned him his own surveillance detail towards the end of 1936 and well into 1937. Gurbachan Singh was taken aback in 1937 to see plain-clothes police following him, even though Udham seemed blasé about it: ‘Two men were always following him. All the time. He knew it too. Sometimes he would go and speak to them, and say, “You look like a family man. Why don’t you go home to your family? Don’t waste your time on me. Honestly, I promise I will be a good boy.’ ” Gurbachan laughed as he told his grandson the story. ‘He just wasn’t afraid of anyone.’14
Udham’s lack of fear, which had so impressed his friend, bordered on the reckless. Either he did not understand the threat, or he was arrogant enough to think it did not matter. His devil-may-care attitude extended, much to the horror of many of his compatriots, far beyond the police, and to God almighty himself.
Nazir Singh Mattu first noticed Udham Singh while praying at the Shepherd’s Bush gurdwara. He had noticed Udham helping himself to cash from the collection plate, an unconscionable sin.
Traditionally at Sikh temples, worshippers arrive and are faced with the Holy Book. It sits in the very centre of the room and is watched over by a granthi, or priest, who fans it with the reverence of a man serving an emperor. A collection plate or box is usually placed before the book, where, having knelt down in supplication, Sikhs are expected to donate to the gurdwara and its charitable causes.
‘He put in six pence and took a half crown,’15 remembered Nazir many years later. ‘Obviously people were looking at him. He said “It has nothing to do with you. It’s between babaji and me. I am taking it from babaji’s bank.’ ”16
Babaji or ‘father’ was an honorary address for Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith. According to Nazir, Udham benefited from ‘father’s’ generosity on more than one occasion. ‘He was never short of money . . . He used to say that people may become short of money but I cannot . . . If you need to pay for it, just go and pray for it.’17
Nazir found Udham’s shamelessness intoxicating. He had been an impressionable nineteen-year-old when he first met the older man, living at a pedlar house 3 miles from one of Udham’s multiple addresses, The Manor, in Hayes, Middlesex.
Nazir was not himself a pedlar but worked as a fruit-picker on the nearby market garden farms in Osterley and Hampton. The hours were long, the labour intense, and the house he returned to was grubby and overcrowded. It stood behind one of the area’s best-known pubs, The Grapes, a favourite among the men who worked at the Nestle factory some 2 miles away.
The air around Hayes was thick with the smell of chocolate and coffee. Indians added to the aroma with their cooking spices, lovingly brought from home wrapped in brown paper, tied with coarse twine. These spices, an immediate portal to their homes and families, were as valuable as gold to them.
Nazir had only been in England for a few months when Udham Singh wafted into his life. Nazir, like Udham, was the survivor of a challenging childhood. His uncle had lost all his own children to tuberculosis, and when Nazir was just a baby, he asked if he could have one of his brother’s children to ease the loss of his wife. Nazir was duly handed over.
Though he did not articulate the effect his father’s decision had on him, as an old man he would recall that his main reason for travelling to England was that he might be able to send money to his birth mother, perhaps an attempt to ease their mutual loss. Only much later did he find out that his cash never actually reached her, going into his father’s pocket as soon as it arrived.
Nazir, the dutiful, separated son, picked fruit and vegetables in England from morning till dusk, earning £2.50 a day, most of which he sent back home. When a friend formally introduced him to Udham, he was immediately drawn to him, in spite of his blasphemous behaviour in the gurdwara. Young Nazir believed he learned more from Udham than he had from any other man in his life: ‘I loved the way he spoke, his arguments, every word he uttered.’18 The affection seemed intense and reciprocated. The two began to socialise, and within a short space of time Udham left The Manor and moved in with Nazir and his fellow housemates, making them think theirs was his only home.
As with his other ‘homes’, Udham would go missing for days on end, leaving his housemates to speculate on what he was up to. One day Udham decided to take Nazir into his confidence and offered to take him along for one of his mysterious car journeys: ‘He said to me: “Look. Join me and I will take you somewhere.” I said: “Where?” He said: “I will show you Canterbury on my own expense,” and then he showed me everything.’19 One day, during one of these long road trips, ‘Udham Singh, pointing towards a traffic policeman, said: “Should we finish one firangi?’ ”20
Nazir was stunned into silence. After what seemed an interminable silence, Udham laughed: ‘“I was just checking you. I don’t want to kill cats and dogs” – he used to call English [police] cats and dogs – “we have to do other [much bigger] things in life.’ ”21
Nazir never did say what those ‘bigger things’ might be, but he continued to travel up and down the
country at Udham’s side. They visited Coventry frequently, where Udham seemed to have a special interest in a nascent trade union body called the Indian Workers Association (IWA).
Unlike their London compatriots, many Indians in the Midlands managed to find employment in car plants spread across the region. Though they did the same jobs as British workers, they received less money, were barred from promotion, and were subject to summary dismissal if they raised objections.
Against this background, in the early 1930s a Punjabi Muslim, Akbar Ali Khan, working with a Sikh named Charan Singh Cheema, decided to challenge the status quo by forming the IWA.22 The association deliberately conducted its business in Hindustani to keep discussions secret from the factory bosses, yet almost from inception these meetings were infiltrated by informants who reported back to the IPI and police.
They described the IWA as a hotbed of Ghadar and Communist activity. Though files were opened on many of the ringleaders, spies failed to notice a quiet man who stood at the back. He seemed happy to prod discussions along gently, shifting them from factory business to general discontent about British bosses and British rule whenever he could.23
Nazir, his young acolyte, went on to become an active organiser of the IWA, instrumental in founding its London chapter. He was immensely proud of his work with them. Almost as proud as he was of his friendship with Udham.* He would have done anything for either of them.
Udham’s popularity among the pedlars was no mystery. He swaggered while they stooped, and though he rarely seemed to do any work, he was never short of cash. He drank in pubs, entertaining goras† with tall tales from India; a charming chancer, known to con barmen out of free drinks by pretending to be a member of the Patiala royal family.24 His ‘Punjabi prince’ persona, one which he had loaned to Pritam many years before, was a hit with the ladies. Fellow pedlars were in awe of his confidence. He was able to romance exotic women while they remained prisoners of their own broken English.
Like a chameleon, Udham Singh inculcated himself into more educated circles, too. Two of his most loyal friends would be Diwan Singh, a practising medical doctor, and Shiv Singh Johal, an educated businessman. Both served the Shepherd’s Bush gurdwara, as president and general secretary respectively. It is doubtful they knew of the unofficial loans their temple was making to Udham, though they would have sympathised with his cause entirely. ‘We all loved him. He was just great with us kids, really great – he liked children, and genuinely seemed to enjoy our company. I remember he brought laughter into the house.’25
Sitting in the House of Lords almost eighty years later, Lord Indarjit Singh, now a peer of the realm in Britain, had only the fondest memories of Udham, whom he had come to know well during his childhood in Birmingham. ‘I have vivid memories of him, tall and handsome. A hasmukh* guy. My parents looked forward to his frequent visits and so did we.’26
Indarjit was only five when he first met Udham Singh, and would know him over a period of two years. His father, Dr Diwan Singh, was an observant, turbaned Sikh. His mother, Kundan Kaur, was a firebrand nationalist who had once asked her husband, shortly after they were married, if he would mind her learning how to make bombs to use against the Raj. She never did, but she longed for Indian independence.
Religious Sikhs like Indarjit’s parents had grown increasingly disillusioned with the British since the early 1900s. Several of their important places of worship were under the control of udasi mahants (clergymen) appointed by the Raj. These mahants were regarded as stooges and detested by most of the congregation. One had caused a wave of rage and revulsion when, as jathedar, or ‘head’, of the Golden Temple in 1919, he saw fit to present Brigadier Rex Dyer with a siropa, a shawl of honour, after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It was, he said, a token of thanks on behalf of all Sikhs for getting Amritsar back under control after the riots.27
Like most Amritsari Sikhs, Diwan Singh found the act repugnant. As more allegations of corruption and toadying were levelled at mahants in Punjab, orthodox Sikhs formed a new brotherhood of ‘true believers’. They called themselves the Akalis, or ‘immortals’, and in 1922, at a religious site some 12 miles away from Amritsar, they chose to make their stand.
Guru ka Bagh, or the ‘Garden of the Gurus’, is a complex comprising two ancient gurdwaras and a garden. One of the temples commemorates the visit of Guru Arjan in 1585, the other is associated with a visit from Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1664. It was here that, on 12 September 1922, the Akali first challenged the British hold on their places of worship. Dressed in black turbans and white kurta pyjama,* hundreds advanced slowly on the Bagh. Anticipating violence, they had invited members of the press and observers from the Congress Party to bear witness. Among them was the Christian missionary C. F. Andrews, the same close friend of Gandhi who had collected evidence after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It is largely thanks to his eyewitness account that we know what happened that day.
The police had cordoned off the area with a line of men, British officers and Indian sepoys, all carrying lathis. The Akali were unarmed and resolved to follow Gandhi’s principles of non-violence. No matter how the British beat them, they would not reply in kind. If they fell, they would get up again and march to the Bagh, but never raise a hand in violence. Diwan Singh was a medical student at the time and it was his duty to bandage up the wounded, just enough to get them on their feet and walking again.
C. F. Andrews described what young Dr Diwan Singh saw with his own eyes:
. . . I noticed the extraordinary devotion of the women. Their faces were full of motherly tenderness towards those who were going forward, in the name of their religion, to receive suffering without retaliation.28
Sikh men of all ages marched in rows of four, approaching the police with their hands pressed together in prayer. As they came close, the police brought down their lathis on their heads and faces. Andrews noticed the sticks used by the British had brass tips. Bleeding heavily, they fell in silence and were dragged away, only to be replaced by four more Akalis. The Sikhs bore their beatings stoically but kept coming, and very quickly the police started to lose control of their tempers.
I saw with my own eyes one of these policemen kick in the stomach of a Sikh who stood helplessly before him. It was a blow so foul that I could hardly restrain myself from crying out loud and rushing forward. But later on I was to see another act which was, if anything, even fuller still. For when one of the Akali Sikhs had been hurled to the ground and was lying prostrate a police sepoy stamped with his foot upon him, using his full weight.29
Many who fell that day had fought alongside the British during the war: ‘They had served in many campaigns in Flanders, in France, in Mesopotamia and in East Africa. Some of them at the risk of their own safety may have saved the lives of Englishmen who had been wounded. Now they were felled to the ground at the hands of English officials serving in the same Government which they themselves had served.’30
Covered in his compatriots’ blood, what Diwan Singh saw that day turned him irreconcilably against the Raj. His participation in the protest marked him as a troublemaker as far as the British were concerned, rendering him unemployable in India. He was forced to leave, trying his luck in East Africa first and then moving to England in 1931: ‘I’m not sure why it occurred to him to come to England,’ his son would later muse.
Like many Indians who migrated to Britain, Dr Diwan Singh found it easy to reconcile his hatred of the Raj with his genuine fondness for British people. They were not to blame for the excesses of their empire, a sentiment Udham Singh shared. When the two men met at the gurdwara, they may not have had God in common, but they shared many other political beliefs.
Far from devout, Udham made frequent use of the temple, even pitching in to make the communal food in the kitchens. A fully turbaned Sikh, Diwan Singh, with his education and devotion to his faith, made an unlikely friend for an atheist who had long since cut his hair and shaved his beard. Nevertheless, over time the two men established a warm r
elationship.
Between 1937 and 1939 while the Metropolitan Police’s interest in him was at its most intense, Udham travelled frequently to Birmingham to spend time with Diwan Singh’s family. Not only did the trips give him respite from the detectives, it also brought him into contact with two little boys. Perhaps they reminded him of the children he had left behind. Indarjit Singh remembered:
Most of the adults who came to our house, and there were lots of them, only wanted to talk to our father, but Udham was different. He used to look for us, seek us out, and talk to us and play with us. We adored him. When it was time to go, my brother and I used to hide his hat. We didn’t want him to go, you see, and he would pretend to be cross and we would jump all over him, and he would roar with laughter. I don’t know how many times we did that to him, hid his hat just as he was trying to leave, but he always acted as if it was the first time.31
Shiv Singh Johal,32 the general secretary of the gurdwara, worked under Diwan Singh, looking after the day-to-day running of Shepherd’s Bush gurdwara:
‘My papaji [honoured father] owed the gurdwara everything,’ explained his son Ajit many years later. ‘It was his home when he first arrived in the country. He stayed on the floor with others and later moved into a flat nearby.’33
Shiv Singh Jouhl was an Akali Sikh who had already got into trouble with the British for his activism around Jullundur in the late 1920s:
He was arrested a couple of times in India for his part in protests against the British, not long prison sentences, weeks rather than months. It marked him out in the eyes of the police. They made his life difficult, see, so he decided to leave and try his luck elsewhere in the Empire. He needed a clean start. He came to England.