by Anita Anand
Udham’s words were reported to the police the very next morning, however, when they came to question him, ‘Singh Azad’ was gone. Perhaps the cold light of day had sobered him up, or at the very least shown him how one emotional explosion threatened to detonate twenty years of effort. It was hard to fathom just how he could have been so very careless.
A contributing factor to Udham’s instability at this time might be explained by some recent and devastating news. Har Dayal, the leader of the Ghadars in America, had died unexpectedly, and news was just starting to filter across the ocean. The manner of his passing had rocked an already weakened movement. There were murmurings of murder.
Har Dayal, a perfectly fit and healthy 55-year-old man, had been in Philadelphia at the time. According to one of his fellow Ghadar brothers, Hanumant Sahay, Har Dayal had been re-energised by the war. His movement had been dwindling in power and influence thanks to a corralled leadership in the United States and rifts within its rank and file. Splinter groups had been developing, but Har Dayal had never given up hope of making the Ghadars a unified and feared force once again. He saw the outbreak of the Second World War as an opportunity to reinvent the movement, to once more sow dissent in the ranks of the British Indian army and capitalise on potential help from Russia and Germany.
Har Dayal delivered a barnstorming speech on the night of 4 March and, pleased with the result, retired to his bed. Those who came to rouse him in the morning found him dead. Hanumant Sahay would always insist that Har Dayal, his mentor, had been poisoned,8 and that somehow the British had managed to get to him in America. News of Har Dayal’s death, which took a month to reach India, longer still to reach Britain, would have come as a body blow to Udham, already feeling cut off from the world.
The organisation that had given him his revolutionary life was as fatherless as he was, an unbalancing sensation that appears to have pushed him harder to pursue his own goal. If they could get to Har Dayal, how long would it be before the British would get to him?
It was too late and too difficult to get his hands on a new identity, so Udham was forced to stick with ‘Singh Azad’. He was next seen in Bournemouth, where barely two weeks later he managed to get work as a carpenter at the Blandford militia camp. Less strategically significant than Southampton, it did at least bring him closer to his own personal mission. Blandford was just down the coast from south Devon, the location of Michael O’Dwyer’s holiday home. Somehow, just weeks after hearing of the Ghadar leader’s death, Udham finally managed to get his hands on Sir Michael’s address. In the accounts column for 13 June 1939, Udham wrote the following in his diary ‘Sir M O’Dwyer, Sunnybank, Thurlestone, South Devon’.9
Not only did he write it in his diary, but later he would also note it in an aide-memoire to himself, reminding him of the major epochs in his life. Though he would attempt to destroy that document by ripping it to pieces, police would piece together the fragments and find a timeline of sorts. A few simple lines in Udham’s handwriting opened up a complicated set of questions:
1938 – Met Moola through Col. Appleby, Cheltenham. Took Moola and . . . to Brighton and Bognor.
1939 – Moola’s letter arrived and I met . . . Windsor Staines and (?) Calif of England – to go to America . . . he and his son . . . Commissioner – San Francisco, if you are keen on Government service . . . gave me his address and said I shall go to Devon on 13 June.10
The police would do their best to transcribe Udham’s scrawl, but they were only ever able to make out some of his words. Those that they could read sounded like gibberish. However, with the benefit of hindsight, there is much we can unpack today.
‘Moola’, it would later transpire, was the same Mool Chand who had been arrested with Udham in 1938, trying to get money ‘with menaces’ from fellow Indians. He had worked for the postal service, which is perhaps how he managed to get his hands on the letter with Sir Michael’s address upon it.
Sir Michael’s south Devon hideaway was easy enough to reach, even if it involved a meandering coastal route. Killing him there would be far easier than in central London, where porters manned mansion blocks, police were patrolling in numbers, and streets were always busy.
In the same garbled note-to-self, Udham wrote that ‘Moola’ had been introduced to him by some mysterious Colonel Appleby. He would refer to ‘Col. Appleby’ a few times in his private writing, always in cryptic ways, careful to give nothing away of his identity. Remembering the landscape of the days leading up to his revenge, he merely noted places they had met: ‘[1939] Col. Appleby . . . Glasgow and Blackpool . . . and every evening went for a walk, and Weston-Super-Mare Atlantic Hotel, Cheltenham – Queen’s Hotel . . . Mary Hotel – every day. Used to take me for a walk.’11
A meeting with ‘Col. Appleby’ had preceded Udham’s decision to up sticks from London and move to the coast. Files on Udham Singh, which have been forced open by Freedom of Information requests, contain no follow-up on ‘Col. Appleby’, nor any indication of further investigation into him. That seems strange to say the least. It is possible they did not find him of interest, but it is more likely there are other files, top secret in nature, connected to the Udham Singh case which have yet to be identified and opened to scrutiny.
A Colonel Appleby does appear in the army lists of 1939, but he was based in Scotland leading his own regiment. He was not the kind of man who would have had the time, let alone the inclination, to meet an Indian pedlar at mysterious assignations around the country. Therefore it is reasonable to speculate that the name was a cover, but for whom, and why?
In 1939, Appleby was the name for a popular fictional character created by the author Michael Innes. ‘Detective Inspector Appleby’ and his adventures kept readers enthralled throughout the 1930s, and his character, used by the British government to track down enemies of the state, would go on to become the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It would have been a pleasingly playful nom de guerre for one working to destabilise the realm, while evading police detection.
Other lines in Udham’s scrawling memoir require less speculation: ‘Commissioner – San Francisco, if you are keen on government service.’12 Sir Michael’s son, John Chevalier O’Dwyer, was now successfully working as vice consul in San Francisco. Was Udham encouraging somebody to deal with the son, while he dealt with the father?
Udham was so close, closer than he had ever been, to fulfilling his vow, but as so often happened flaws, in his own character blew him off course once again. His pride had cost him his career in the army; vanity had cost him his freedom in Amritsar; obsession had cost him a wife and family; and his temper had forced him out of Hampshire.
In Basra, Udham had chafed at the orders of white superiors, and now at the Blandford camp he behaved exactly as his teenage self. Gaffers described him as ‘bad tempered’ and ‘quarrelsome’. They also described his work as ‘unsatisfactory’. On 11 September, ‘Singh Azad’ was fired. It was far from ideal. ‘Col Appleby’ had needed him to gather information, Udham was no longer in a situation to do so. He had done something else, something much worse: ‘It was rumoured . . . that he always carried a loaded revolver. One thing which was noticeable was that he always had a large bulge in his hip pocket. How the rumour originated they [his co-workers] did not know.’13 These were edgy times, and for the second time in a matter of a few weeks, ‘Singh Azad’ was reported to the police.
A young officer named Fisher of the Hampshire Constabulary was sent out to speak to the querulous and potentially armed Indian, but once again Udham disappeared by the time police arrived. Sniffing around in his wake, Fisher found he was not the only one asking questions. Police from the neighbouring constabulary of Southampton were also investigating the disappearance of their mysterious Indian carpenter, and from the sound of it, they were acting on orders much higher than Fisher’s desk sergeant: ‘I understand that in September 1939, enquiries were made concerning AZAD by the Southampton Borough Police on behalf of Major General Sir Vernon Kell,
whose reference no. is L/255 (1) B/4a.’14
It was such a short entry in the police log, showing that Fisher was clearly entirely oblivious to the significance of what he had written. Kell was not ordinary military brass. The 67-year old was in fact one of the most powerful spymasters in the world.
Kell was both the director of MI5, and its founder. A perpetual look of intense concentration had left him with a vertical furrow above the bridge of his nose. There was little about his appearance that betrayed the burden he shouldered. Refined, quiet and considered in speech, his spectacles and neat side parting gave him the look of a somewhat stressed university don, unthreatening and distinctly unmemorable.
In security circles, Kell was referred to reverentially as ‘K’, and the MI5 motto, ‘Regnum Defende’ or ‘Defence of the Realm’, gave some indication of the scope of his responsibility. Perhaps Kell had taken a special interest in the case of ‘Singh Azad’ because he recognised the oddness of the name. Unlike many of his colleagues, ‘K’ knew India well, and he had come across men like Udham before.
During the First World War, Kell’s MI5 (g) section had infiltrated groups of Indian revolutionaries in Bengal, Britain and North America. Together with John Wallinger, Vickery’s predecessor at the IPI, he had foiled a Ghadar Party plot to assassinate Lord Kitchener, the then secretary of state for war.15
That Kell himself had picked up a phone to make inquiries of ‘Singh Azad’ speaks volumes. It tells us there are almost certainly MI5 files on Udham and his alias that have yet to see the light of day. It also tells us that MI5 was deeply fallible in 1939, because after his initial inquiries, Kell either lost sight of or interest in Udham Singh.
The pedlar/carpenter disappeared from sight again. Udham Singh had by now managed to slip through the fingers of the police, the IPI and MI5, all in the space of a few weeks. What he lacked in personal judgement, he more than made up for in skill or luck. For the next six months Udham would lay low, waiting until he was sure the police were no longer looking for him. The date in his diary had suggested he intended to kill Sir Michael on 13 June 1940, when he would have moved to his Devon address for the summer. As it would turn out, Udham could not wait that long.
LONDON, MARCH 1940
The pedlars settled down to their regular meal, each producing a different dish to share with the group. This dinner was the same as the usual communal meals, but it somehow felt different. Udham was back after a long and unexplained absence. Though he was usually a lively addition to any gathering, on this occasion he seemed to be bouncing off the walls. Nobody could really understand what he had to be so happy about.
The past few months had not been easy. Since his return to London in late 1939, the few who had actually seen Udham found him more restless than ever. He seemed to be living a near vagrant life, never spending more than a few days in the same place. For one who had been so flashy and proud, it appeared to be a miserable fall from grace.
Udham was not working, had no car, his motorbike was gone and there was no glamorous girl on his arm. Someone had even seen him signing on for unemployment benefit. Despite his apparent run of bad luck, Udham turned up for this particular pedlar dinner in a giddy mood. He seemed determined to enjoy himself, and had even brought a box of laddoos with him, the traditional Indian sweet usually distributed for the birth of a baby boy. Towards the end of the meal, Udham drew aside his old friend Gurbachan Singh and turned deadly serious for a moment: ‘If anyone asks you about me, just say you don’t know me, OK?’16 Gurbachan laughed off the comment. His friend was always so dramatic.
Bidding farewell to his raucous pedlar friends, Udham next went to see a far more solemn man, also based in the East End of London. Surat Ali17 was a one-man nexus of Indian discontent: a trade union activist; a member of the Indian Workers Association; a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain; and a hero to the lascars.
To the British authorities, Surat Ali was one of the worst kind of agitators, and had been under surveillance for some time, particularly after he organised a series of strikes at London’s docks demanding more pay for the Indian seamen. The police who kept watch on Surat Ali would have seen Udham coming to visit him on 11 March. They would have seen him leave, but they would have no idea who he was until much later. Nor would they ever know what actually passed between the two men.
Surat Ali would be hauled in for questioning by police in the days that followed, and though he would admit that he knew Udham, he would deny that he had any knowledge of what he was about to do. He also denied supplying him with a gun.18
Banta Singh was one of the last of Udham’s friends to see him as a free man. A fellow East End pedlar, Banta and Udham had a unique kind of friendship. Perhaps Banta Singh reminded him of the Khalsa brothers who had run the orphanage, but where his other pedlar friendships were defined by goodhearted tomfoolery, he reserved a near reverential respect for this particular man. Banta Singh’s son, Peter, described the dynamic many years later:
My father used to live first at Adler Street and later at Crispin Street in East London, both pedlar houses . . . He had known Udham for about five years in London. They even lived together for a spell. It was a funny friendship because they were so different. Udham Singh was so child-like it was almost like he needed my father to act as his adult.
Father was a very religious man, a fully turbaned Sikh. Udham used to call him ‘Bhai-ji’ – it meant ‘priest’ or ‘the learned one’. I think it was because father wore a white turban and white clothes and knew all his prayers. Father told me that on 11 March 1940, Udham paid him an unexpected visit sometime in the night. He knew how much Udham Singh hated Michael O’Dwyer. He used to talk about it all the time. That night, Udham was in a strange mood and it scared my father.19
Unable to settle down, Udham paced the floor and spoke very quickly:
He told my father to pack his things and leave town that very night if he could. Because he was planning to do something.20
‘What are you going to do, Bawa?’ My father asked him, even though he said he knew deep down.21
‘Pack your bags and leave now. You are my friend. I don’t want you to get caught up in whatever will come next,’ Udham said.
His relationship with Banta was the kind a Catholic might have with a confessional priest, and Udham clearly felt he could tell Banta anything without being betrayed.
Udham had told Banta of his all-consuming hatred of O’Dwyer. He had even told him that he would kill him one day. As a religious man, Banta believed judgement and justice lay in the hands of the maker, not his creation, and had, in the past, attempted to counsel him out of his rage. Udham must have known his pious friend would try to talk him out of his plan that night too. He was right: ‘I begged him not to do it,’ Banta Singh later told his son. ‘I really begged him. But he was adamant. He had waited twenty years to punish the man who had killed so many that day [in Jallianwala Bagh]. I told him again and again that nothing he could do would bring them back. He just bowed his head and said, “Bhai-ji, you can ask me to do anything, give you anything but you cannot ask me this. It has to be this way. He has to die and I have to do it.’ ”22
Udham was testing his resolve one last time. Having failed to change his friend’s mind, Banta was sufficiently disturbed by what Udham had said that he left London the very next day, moving as far away from the capital as he could. Banta Singh would settle in Cornwall in the West Country. He never returned to the capital. Though he cared nothing for O’Dwyer, it broke his heart that he had not been able to stop, and by extension save, his friend.
13 MARCH 1940
London awoke to a continuous and gentle snowfall.23 As Udham took the razor to his face, a layer of powdery white began to cover the streets like a thin shroud. He scraped away the cream and coarse black bristle, pulling his skin taut, looking at it from every angle. He had to look good today. The world would be watching.
Buttoning up his clean white shirt, Udham pulled a sober yet
smart suit out of his wardrobe: slate grey, deeply ordinary. This was no time for his exuberant American checks. He had to be respectably boring today. The kind of man nobody would look at twice. An invisible man. A ghost.
The government had passed a law in September 1939 requiring everyone to carry an identity card. Udham looked at his own with satisfaction before slipping it into the top inside pocket of his jacket. He was: ‘Mohamed Singh Azad, 8 Mornington Terrace, Regent’s Park’.24 So perfect. He almost looked forward to them finding it.
The name was an iteration of the one that had piqued Kell’s interest. Udham knew ‘Singh Azad’ was known to the police, but he was not ready to let it go. He had chosen it with such care. His recent brushes with the law had given him cause to reconfigure it, so he had merely added a third to the front. Atheist turned prophet, Udham would be Mohamed today, and hopefully for ever after.
India would understand. For two decades he had worked at becoming the man who could make Sir Michael pay for Jallianwala Bagh, however in the process he believed he had become so much more. It was no longer enough to settle his own score; he now had to unite his people in a full-blown revolution. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs would come together behind his act. He would avenge the dead. He would inspire the living.
The drop in the mercury made his shave less pleasant than it could have been that morning, but it was hugely helpful to his mission. Everyone would be wearing their heavy winter coats. His had big, deep pockets, and Udham had a lot to carry.
Slipping the lid from the square wooden box on his table, Udham counted the contents. Seventeen rounds, all present and correct.25 He shut the box and dropped it into his right-hand jacket pocket.26 It was reassuringly solid against his hip. He then dropped eight loose bullets into his right trouser pocket.27 These would be easy to reach, jingling pleasingly, like innocent small change.