Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  As the volume of exported goods from India increased, more lascars were employed, and the complaints multiplied. Some shipping companies simply refused to pay the sailors anything at all, threatening them with violence if they pressed for their meagre wages. In the early 1800s, the problem of destitute lascars had reached such a level that the East India Company was embarrassed into action. Grudgingly, arrangements were made to provide the lascars with board and lodging when they arrived. These dwellings were of the meanest kind, mainly in the slums of east London.

  It was not long before locals started to complain about the ‘nuisance’ from the foreign presence, and so the lascars were moved out of the city to Shadwell, a swampy area on the north bank of the Thames. Tales of lascar suffering began to attract the notice of local Christian missions. Church groups unearthed tales of flogging and starvation in the boarding houses, but even though the missionaries seemed to be the only ones who cared about the lascars’ plight, they too could take a dim view of their humanity: ‘They are the senseless worshippers of dumb idols, or the deluded followers of the licentious doctrines of a false prophet . . . ignorant, darkened, and deceived through the blindness which is in them . . . They are the enemies to God by wicked works; they are practically and abominably wicked. They are a prey of each other and of the rapacious poor.’9

  In one fact-finding mission in 1814, at a boarding house near Wapping, a member of the newly created organisation for the ‘Protection of Asiatic Sailors’ found ‘nearly two or three hundred of them . . . ill-fed and badly treated by a person (a superior lascar) who had command of them, both as to food, clothes and settling disputes among them. He frequently whipped them.’10

  The buildings the lascars lived in were not fit for human habitation; most were cold and cavernous warehouses, designed and built for storing cargo, ‘very dirty, and . . . without pavement – the floor consisting of earth’.11At the back of the warehouse were rows of tall, narrow cupboards, where dockworkers stored their gear. When one of the missionary inspectors asked for these to be opened, ‘out came a living lascar’ who had been ‘put into confinement for quarrelling and bad behaviour’.12 How long he had been there, the missionary did not say.

  Unlike most people in England, Sophia had grown up vaguely aware of the lascars’ plight. Her late father, at the age of eighteen, just two years after his arrival in England, had provided finances to build and run a house for ‘Oriental Seamen’. For Duleep’s sake, Prince Albert had laid the first stone of the ‘Strangers Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders’. But as her father’s attentions wandered, the lascars trapped in the West also drifted from his mind. By the time Sophia returned from her trip to Punjab, the Indian sailors had been neglected for decades. Duleep Singh’s safe haven for them in East London’s West India Dock Road was falling apart, stretched well beyond its capacity. The number of lascars hired to handle cargo had grown exponentially since her father’s day. On her return to England, Sophia found the Indian sailors clustered in their poverty around the foetid grime of London’s three main docks. Shunned by society, the lascars stuck close to the River Thames, along which warehouses and cramped cheap accommodation blistered from the dank and stinking marshland.

  The place was steeped in toxic industrial waste, dumped just outside the city limits. Opium dens and brawling bars dotted the landscape, and shivering lascars would often spend what little they had attempting to escape their appalling realities at the bottom of a bottle or in the curling smoke of a drug haze. The stranded sailors gave up hope of ever seeing their homes or their families again.

  Sophia had found her cause and she threw herself into it. She began to evangelise among her rich friends, raising both awareness of the lascars’ plight and funds to support them. Her social circle was bemused by her behaviour. When had Sophia ever cared about such things? Despite their confusion, Sophia galvanised support. Money started coming in, bulwarked by her own sizeable donations. Eventually Sophia’s ambitions would dwarf the lascar provision created by her father and the East India Company. Together with two friends she would build and furnish a new lascar safe haven in London’s Victoria Docks. In only a matter of five years, almost five thousand lascars would pass through its doors seeking and receiving urgent help.13

  Although she was oblivious to such trends in her small circle of party-hopping aristocrats, Princess Sophia’s embrace of social philanthropy chimed with the times. Recent decades had seen a flowering of women’s charity work in fields of poverty and welfare. From the mid-nineteenth century it had become increasingly common for women of the upper-middle classes to concern themselves with the hardship of those less fortunate. Although charitable organisations were still run by men, it was becoming socially acceptable for women to use their ‘maternal instincts’ to work for the poor under such aegises. Acting as patrons of schools and hospitals, they devoted their time and money to the dispossessed in the city slums. What they saw made them angry. A radical form of women’s politics was emerging. It centred on the belief that women were the key to family prosperity. They were less likely to drink away wages, and more likely to put the interests of their children before anything else. An unassuming house on Nelson Street, in the Chorlton-on-Medlock area of Manchester, became a particularly vibrant hub of activity. It was the family home of Emmeline Pankhurst.

  Born in Lancashire, in Manchester’s Moss Side, Pankhurst had witnessed the difficulties rapid industrialisation had caused, particularly for women and children. Between the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the population of Moss Side exploded from 151 to 26,677.14 Row upon row of cramped red-brick tenements scratched through the landscape as the city of Manchester swelled to accommodate the growing working class. They had been drawn to the area by the proliferation of textile mills. The city became the place where most of the cotton, transported by the lascars from India, was converted to cloth. Textile manufacturing so dominated Manchester that it became known as Cottonopolis.

  Pankhurst watched as overcrowding brought poverty, disease and brutality to her city. Hunger was driving the poor to desperation, and Emmeline was horrified by the number of young girls she saw being pushed into prostitution. In 1894 she became a Poor Law Guardian and would regularly visit workhouses. During Queen Victoria’s reign, the general attitude to the poor had been hardening. Previously the destitute were looked after by the state and provided with food and clothing paid for by funds levied from the wealthy. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 changed all that. It ensured that no able-bodied person could get financial aid unless they went to live in special institutions where they would have to work for their food and lodging. The most vulnerable found themselves living cheek by jowl in the most basic, crowded accommodation on subsistence rations. In the workhouse, people were expected to labour for up to twelve hours a day. Soon, orphans and children whose parents were just too poor to feed them were abandoned on the doorstep. Anyone who fell on hard times could find themselves in the workhouse, but perhaps the worst treatment of all was meted out to unmarried mothers. They not only had to keep up with the harsh demands of the regime while nursing their babies, but also had to deal with sexual violence and the unforgiving judgement of their peers.

  Moved by their plight, Emmeline Pankhurst decided that women needed to have a voice in the way society was run. Without the vote, she believed her sex would never truly be able to change anything. The men in the House of Commons, she argued, had little interest in or knowledge of the suffering of women. Emmeline was not the first to seek political empowerment for her sex. Millicent Fawcett, leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), and sister of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, had politely and persistently been asking politicians to extend the franchise to women for years. Fawcett had enjoyed a close relationship with the Liberal Party, and had assured her followers that by putting pressure on them, the shape of politics would eventually change to include them. However, Fawcett had put her faith in a party which was dee
ply divided on the issue. Every time she pushed them towards electoral equality, the Liberals pushed back. They bickered amongst themselves and backtracked on any commitment. Emmeline Pankhurst had initially supported Fawcett’s efforts but by the turn of the century her patience had worn thin.

  Pankhurst explored other political options beyond the NUWSS. She became a leading light of the Women’s Franchise League, an organisation which supported the newly formed Independent Labour Party; but even Keir Hardie’s progressive party moved too slowly for her liking. Pankhurst decided to take matters into her own hands. As they huddled around the table at her house in Manchester on 10 October 1903, a small group of women, including Emmeline’s daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela, decided that only a militant organisation, prepared to break the law, could break the deadlock. The Women’s Society for Social and Political Union (WSPU) was born. It was an organisation which would reshape the political map of Britain by force and ultimately dominate the life of an Indian princess living at Hampton Court, even though she had no idea at the time.

  It had long been Sophia’s custom to receive her breakfast in bed. Her lady’s maid brought up a large brass tray, one of her purchases from India, with a small silver teapot, two boiled eggs, toast, fruit and some goat’s-milk curd.15 The last item was an exotic addition to her menu, a habit formed from her time in India. Previously it had been Sophia’s habit to wake just before noon, her nights having been filled with parties and dances. However, since her return from Lahore, she rose earlier and liked to start the day by reading the newspapers in bed. In 1903 it felt as if the world was changing so quickly. Pages were filled with stories of women defying their subordinate role in society. It was the year that scientist Marie Curie became the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Mary Howarth not only became the subject of headlines, she gained the power to write them, becoming the editor in chief of the one-penny Daily Mirror. The newspaper, ‘for gentlewomen by gentlewomen’, immediately caused a storm in Fleet Street. A one-time glamorous secretary called Dorothy Levitt gave the papers plenty to write about too when she became the first woman to take part in a public motor-car race in 1903. She went on to cause deeper consternation still by taking water- and land-speed records, leaving the men in her wake.

  Although such stories caught Sophia’s eye, they were not the first thing she sought out in the headlines. The newspapers of 1903 were also peppered with the latest disgrace facing her eldest brother. While Sophia had been discovering India, Victor had found himself teetering on the edge of financial ruin again. Though he had tempered his wilder excesses after marriage, he still managed to grossly exceed his allowance. Coupled with the historic debts that were catching up with him, Victor was faced with liabilities in excess of £100,000. When moves were made to collect on the debts, Victor argued that the bailiffs had no right to seize his belongings. In anticipation of the gathering storm, he had signed over the house and most valuable items to Anne soon after they wed. The creditors argued that the prince had deliberately hidden assets and an acrimonious court case ensued which dragged on for months and was widely reported in the national press. The Daily Mail was among those publications that covered the extent of Victor’s problems in detail: ‘It appeared that in 1899 His Highness made a free gift of the contents of Hockwold Hall to his wife. In 1902 he became bankrupt, and the question raised was whether the gift was a valid one, and whether, considering his financial position at the time, it was rendered void under the Bankruptcy Act . . . His pension is £8,000 a year from the Indian Government, and could not be assigned or anticipated. The reason given by him for his bankruptcy was that he was unable to live on the allowance made to him.’16

  Victor was furious that his financial troubles were being laid bare and lashed out the only way he knew. Like his father before him, he made his own aggressive counter-claim against the British government. He argued that the late Maharajah’s personal assets were worth many times more than the settlement imposed upon the Maharajah’s children. Furthermore, Victor insisted that if he were given his fair inheritance then he would have no problem paying off his debts like a gentleman. The move was as futile as any launched by Maharajah Duleep Singh. In the end the courts judged the prince to be bankrupt, and told him that the only way he might save himself from total disgrace was if he could pay his creditors ten shillings of every pound he owed. Powerless to do anything else, Victor accepted the verdict, while squirreling away as much as he could from his creditors. For two years, Prince Freddie and Sophia became entangled in Victor’s complex financial arrangements. Sophia even became complicit in hiding some of Victor’s jewels, helping to spread them around family strong-boxes, to be returned at a later date.17 It was a worrying time, made all the more so with her sisters away because she had nobody there to confide in.

  Sophia attempted to distract herself with friends, fundraising, and a regular correspondence with Catherine and Bamba, in which the sisters filled pages with the minutiae of their days and amusing anecdotes. But it was getting harder to cheer Sophia up. Most of the pursuits which had previously absorbed her seemed empty and unimportant now. Her life at Hampton Court was beginning to grate and she found the routine stifling. Sophia relied on Bamba to provide the odd diversion, and even from as far away as Lahore, her sister did not disappoint. One day Sophia had been stunned to find the loaded pistol Bamba had hidden in her bedside cabinet at Faraday House. Wiring India, she asked what she should do. Bamba immediately telegraphed back warning her not to touch it herself, but to get a footman to deal with the gun’s disposal.18 Bamba was aware that depression was filling her little sister’s head with dark thoughts. The last thing she needed was access to a firearm.

  For months Sophia had been writing increasingly sullen letters to Catherine and Bamba. At first both of them perversely revelled in her Faraday House unhappiness: ‘So you are beginning to have enough of the vulgarity of H. C.!’19 wrote Catherine cheerfully; ‘I should somehow make you come here and not go near that detestable dog-kennel vulgarness called Faraday House.’20 And as if to rub salt into her sister’s wounds, Catherine added at the end of her letter: ‘How I pity you in that filthy climate.’ 21

  Catherine and her governess were now living happily together in Cassel, a town in northern Hesse. The Brothers Grimm had written most of their fairy tales there and the landscape formed a chocolate-box backdrop for their happiness. Vast parks with ornamental fountains, canals, lakes and statues provided the women with beauty and tranquillity. The odd couple pursued a simple life together. They went for long bracing walks, pottered around old shops in remote villages and while Catherine tended the garden, Lina Shaeffer spent her days in the kitchen cooking all the things Catherine liked to eat, as she wrote to Sophia: ‘I am having a very good time of it and enjoying myself thoroughly.’22

  In India, Bamba too seemed content for the first time in her life. Refusing to return to Europe with either of her sisters, she was realising her dream. She moved from temporary accommodation at the luxurious Braganza Hotel to her own house near the Shalimar Gardens, where her father had played as a boy. She called her new Lahore home ‘The Palms’, and set about furnishing it with as much love and care as her youngest sister had lavished on Faraday House.

  Sophia kept writing in vain, asking when Catherine and Bamba might come back to her. London made her feel unbearably lonely and to escape the silence of her grace-and-favour home, she had taken to spending long stretches of time with her friends, the Mackenzies, in Inverness. It was as far away from Hampton Court as she could get, but respite was only ever temporary.

  Eventually Catherine stopped teasing and felt the depth of her sister’s feelings. She tried to explain as tenderly as she could, why she could not bring herself to return to Faraday House: ‘It was delightful for you to be so long in Scotland. You ought to come out here. What Scotland is for you, this is for me. I have such an appetite and have got such red cheeks. In fact I am just “bursting” and feel quite a different being to what
I felt [in England] . . . You know how dead tired I always was even after doing nothing at H Court. You had better come out! The air is so delightful here and then Miss S’s excellent German food is too good for any words.’23 Sophia did not take up the offer, and instead remained in London where depression pushed her further under.

  Bamba was the first to become truly alarmed by her youngest sister’s condition. Sophia had admitted to her in a letter that she had stopped taking music lessons and hardly touched the piano any more. Bamba begged her to make time for her music since it had always brought her joy in the past. When she saw the latest pictures Sophia had commissioned of herself, Bamba realised that there was something gravely wrong. What looked out at her from the photograph was a pale and fragile version of her little sister, with none of the old spark in her eyes. She wrote to her, addressing Sophia with the childhood nickname she had used in the nursery: ‘Thanks to little Asa for the delightful surprise of a photograph . . . But it is not Asa. It is much too serious and she looks very thin and ill. The eyes are the only nice part and they are much too sad . . . Be quick and look better.’24

  Sophia’s brother Frederick was blithely unaware of her suffering. He threw himself into his local branch of the Duke of York’s Own Loyal Suffolk Hussars, a volunteer cavalry unit which collected and drilled regularly near his home. Prince Frederick’s involvement with the Yeomanry was more out of a fervent loyalty to the Crown than either a desire or an ability to be a soldier. By the turn of the century he had become a round and avuncular figure with his sharply tailored clothes camouflaging an ever more generous belly. His moustache was twirled and tipped with wax, and hereditary baldness had robbed him of the hair Queen Victoria had once so loved. The only battles dapper Freddie was fit to fight were those with the weeds in his vast estate, and he seemed to be losing them too. ‘Nothing goes right, the garden is a failure . . . it is disgusting . . . people’s borders are gorgeous – mine are in swarms.’25