by Anand, Anita
Tin Town itself may have been a metallic sprawl, but it looked out upon picturesque vistas. The site had been donated to the war effort by Mrs Edward Morant, a redoubtable matriarch who lived at Brockenhurst Park, a grand mansion with its own lakes and sculpted grounds. A descendant of one of eighteenth-century England’s richest plantation owners, Mrs Morant was not just wealthy, she was well connected too. Up until the outbreak of war, she had used all her influence and energy to oppose the suffragettes. Morant was one of a number of women recruited by Lord Curzon to show the world that ‘right-minded women’ did not need or want the vote. She served as the President of the Lymington Anti-Suffrage League and was the type of woman Sophia and her friends despised.
Since the Lady Hardinge was not a government hospital and therefore received no state funding, donations were desperately sought for its upkeep. Men who had once served with the Indian Army or civil service contributed funds, but the lion’s share came from the ‘Indian Soldiers’ Fund Sub-Committee of the Ladies’ Committee of the Order of St John of Jerusalem’.
Despite its big name, the charity had small beginnings. At the outbreak of war, members raised just enough money to buy religious artefacts for soldiers at the front. Crates filled with Korans, Brahminical threads and copies of the Sikh holy book were sent to the trenches. However by 1915, when it became clear that Brighton was struggling with the influx of wounded, the fund turned its attention from the soldiers’ spiritual needs to the corporeal. Donating more than £10,000, the charity paid for equipment and vital medical supplies for Brockenhurst and also for a small convalescent home in nearby Milford-on-Sea.18
Because it was privately run, the Lady Hardinge could ignore many of the rules slavishly followed by state hospitals. The ban on female nurses was the first regulation to go. Lady Hardinge ran under the hawkish eye of its matron, Edith McCall Anderson. One of the most highly regarded nurses in the country, Anderson was a sturdy woman with experience of military hospitals dating back to the Boer War.19 With a love of order and discipline, she commanded a contingent of female staff, all of whom were volunteers. These included ‘seventeen Sisters, all of whom speak Hindustani’. The ‘bi-linguals’ had spent their lives in India, either supporting their husbands, or working for the Raj in their own right. They were able to share memories with the men, comfort them in their own language and generally lift their spirits better than anyone else.
Officers in the Indian Army were accorded special privileges at the hospital. They were dressed in rich blue pyjamas and gowns with red piping. The clothes had been donated by one of the richest women in the world, Lady Rothschild, and the men ‘looked very smart as well as warm’.20 Even the hospital bedding and the men’s underclothes had been sent by well-wishers. As a reporter for the British Journal of Nursing noted, some soldiers had found a new use for the knitted scarves that were sent: ‘ingeniously worn in more than one instance as turbans’. The same journalist was particularly impressed by the aesthetic merits of the wards, noting that they had ‘quilts of Turkey twill which suit the dark faces above them’.21
In 1915, the hospital received the royal seal of approval when King George V toured its wards. Although he met the matron and many members of her staff, it is unlikely that His Majesty was introduced to one particular nurse. Sophia Duleep Singh was now a member of Matron McCall Anderson’s caring army. She had not been content with merely visiting the Indian soldiers at Brighton and had swapped her civilian clothes for a Red Cross nurse’s uniform in 1915. She spent much of the year tending to the broken sons of the Punjab. In many ways it felt like coming home for Sophia, who had spent the most stable part of her childhood in Brighton under the care of the Oliphants.
It was the first time many of the men had seen an Indian woman in months, though Sophia was a mystery to them at first. She may have looked like the women they had left at home but she spoke hardly a word of Hindustani and most of the white nurses could communicate better than she could. When they found out who Sophia really was, their confusion turned to awe. The soldiers could not believe that the granddaughter of Ranjit Singh sat by their bedsides in a nurse’s uniform. Of all the Indians at Lady Hardinge Hospital and Milford, the Punjabi soldiers were the most affected by Sophia’s presence. Hardened Sikh fighters were bashful and tongue-tied. When they could muster the courage, they begged the princess for signed photographs so that they could prove to their families that they had truly met a Duleep Singh. Sophia gave them pictures of herself, but felt they deserved something better. Somehow, despite wartime restrictions, Sophia managed to get little ivory shaving mirrors made up for the soldiers in her care. These were flat compacts which could be folded and slipped into pockets. The exotic little luxuries were made all the more precious to the men when she wrote personal messages on the back.22 Soldiers such as Kartar Singh of the 15th Sikhs wrote to his family in Punjab bursting with pride: ‘My friends this is a photo of our King’s granddaughter – he who was King of the Sikhs, Ranjit Singh.’23
Kartar Singh had been the kind of soldier the British high command dreamt of. He obeyed orders efficiently and without question, fought valiantly, and was grateful for every kindness shown to him by the English. There were many like him, young men from the old Sikh kingdom who had left their homes and families, perhaps even their villages for the very first time. They had signed up to fight a foreign war with allies who did not speak the same language as them, against an enemy who posed no threat to their country.
However, not every Punjabi was as loyal as Kartar Singh. Some soldiers in the Indian Army were not only refusing to fight in the Great War, but were also encouraging fellow soldiers to rise up and slit the throats of their British commanding officers. They were members of the Ghadar party (from the Urdu ‘revolt’), and while the British were fully engaged in Europe, they found themselves fighting an enemy that had sprung up within their own ranks too.
The movement was founded in the United States in 1913 by a small group of newly settled Indians. They included Lala Har Dayal, a brilliant Punjabi academic who had moved to America to escape British colonial rule. In his youth in Delhi, Har Dayal had been poor but clever. The sixth of seven children, Har Dayal distinguished himself at school, showing particular aptitude for the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit. He excelled in his degree at the Punjab University, and received scholarships to study at Oxford. However, once in England, Har Dayal became frustrated with the limitations placed on his future. Despite his intellect the best he could hope for on his return was a life as a mid-level bureaucrat in the Indian Civil Service, pushing papers for the British. It was not enough.
Har Dayal began to make visits to India House in Highgate. There, in Krishnavarma’s nest of radicals, he met many young men who hated colonialism as much as he did. Their anti-British speeches made sense to him and he gave up his place at St John’s College, Oxford, returning to India where he wrote fiery anti-colonial articles in the indigenous press. When the Raj banned his writings in 1908, Har Dayal was advised by his great friend (and Sophia’s mentor) Lala Lajpat Rai that arrest was imminent and he should leave India immediately. Heeding his words, he packed and left, not knowing if he would ever return.
Har Dayal travelled around Europe for months before eventually settling in France where he discovered a vibrant anarchist movement. Their belief that any power could be toppled inspired him and he became the editor of a radical Indian newspaper, Vande Mataram (‘I bow to the Motherland’). It was a nationalist publication, written in English, which openly praised men who defied the Raj. Madhan Lal Dhingra, the killer of Curzon Wyllie, was celebrated on the paper’s front pages on the day he was hanged. In a stinging editorial, Har Dayal himself wrote: ‘Dhingra has behaved at each stage of his trial like a hero of ancient times, he has reminded us of the history of medieval Rajputs and Sikhs who loved death like a bride. England thinks she killed Dhingra, in reality he lives forever, and has given the deathblow to English sovereignty in India.’24
Though he
had found his political voice, Paris was not for Har Dayal. Listless, he decided to move again, this time setting his sights on California. In 1911, life in the United States was filled with promise and opportunity. As well as becoming heavily involved in the trade union movement in San Francisco, Har Dayal took up the post of lecturer in Indian philosophy and Sanskrit at Stanford University. He was fired when the administration found out about his anti-British writing.
Without a job, living in cramped, rented accommodation near the University of California in Berkeley, Har Dayal’s sense of dispossession and rage became volcanic. Wanting desperately to go home, but knowing he faced immediate arrest if he did, in 1913, Har Dayal began to plan an uprising. With a group of Indian ex-pat friends, he founded the Ghadar movement.
Punjabis had been coming to America and Canada for years, some to escape arrest, but most to work as labourers on the farms stretching from California’s central valley all the way up to British Columbia. Gurdwaras sprang up in Stockton, then one of California’s largest cities, and Abbotsford and Vancouver in British Columbia. These places of Sikh worship contributed vast sums for Har Dayal’s revolution.
At the beginning, the movement’s most powerful weapon was its newspaper. The Ghadar carried the standard ‘Anghrezi Raj ka Dushman’ under its masthead. Translated, the motto meant ‘Enemies of the British’, and the first line in the very first issue read: ‘Today there begins “Ghadar” in foreign lands, but in our country’s tongue, a war against the British Raj.’
The articles were incendiary: ‘What is our name? Ghadar. What is our work? Ghadar. Where will be the revolution? In India. The time will soon come when rifles and blood will take the place of pens and ink.’25 The Ghadar revolutionaries saw the Great War as an opportunity to agitate while the British were vulnerable. Ghadars urged Indian soldiers to rise up in mutiny against their overstretched commanding officers. From their headquarters in California, they were successful in inciting soldiers in the Hong Kong regiments and in Singapore. Ringleaders were arrested, court-martialled and either hanged or deported to India for trial. Still the rebellion spread. Just outside Singapore city, in February 1915, the worst mutiny of Indian sepoys occurred as the 130th Baluchi Regiment revolted against their officers. Up to half of the 850 soldiers stormed the barracks at Tanglin, and attempted to free the German prisoners of war held there. Most of the Germans refused to join them, despite being offered rifles. Even without their help, the mutiny dragged on for seven days, as the British struggled to take back control. Eventually Allied warships were redirected towards Singapore, and the mutiny was put down, but not before forty-seven British soldiers and local civilians had been killed. In the aftermath of the Singapore mutiny, four Indian soldiers were hanged, sixty-nine were given life imprisonment and 126 were punished with lengthy terms of imprisonment with hard labour.
Despite the punishments, the Ghadar message continued to spread, causing smaller army uprisings as far as Iran and Iraq. Each time the Ghadar sepoys mutinied, they were crushed by superior British firepower. However, the movement had flexed its muscles enough to frighten the Raj. Contagion needed to be stopped before it reached India, where the British might lose control of their empire for ever.
By 1916 a million copies of their weekly newsletter were being published and circulated around the world. The revolutionary message was most enthusiastically received in the Punjab, from where, at the outbreak of the Great War, half the Indian Army had been drawn. Realising the dangers, the British clamped down hard; hundreds of Ghadar sympathisers were rounded up and charged with sedition. According to one Indian estimate, 145 were hanged, and 308 were given sentences longer than fourteen years. The harsher the sentences, the more young Punjabis flocked to the Ghadar flag.
Though she sympathised, Sophia could not bring herself to abandon the Indian soldiers on the Western front. Their pitiful state moved her to search for new ways in which to help them. Just as she did with the suffragettes and the lascars before them, Sophia decided the best thing she could do was raise money.
The British Red Cross’s forty-sixth anniversary on 4 August 1916 gave Sophia her first opportunity. A nationwide event known as ‘Our Day’ was staged across the Empire. Men and women were asked to pay generous sums for the privilege of wearing Red Cross flag badges in their lapels, with proceeds earmarked for a soldiers’ welfare fund. Sophia commandeered the effort for India, and together with a small group of Indian women, part of the first trickle of immigration into Georgian England, set up stalls in front of a well-known whisky merchant in London’s Haymarket. In front of Dewar House, the Indian women, along with British friends dressed in Eastern silks, enthusiastically harangued passers-by for money to be spent specifically on sepoys at the front. Sophia, who led their efforts, wore a sober black skirt suit with a hat and patent court shoes. Many such fundraising events took place up and down the country, but despite her dress, Sophia’s stood out for its colour and exuberance. The Times gave her campaign prominent coverage and, for a change, their about article about Sophia did not condemn or criticise: ‘Haymarket was made gay by the Princess’s Indian stall, which she had draped with Indian silks and gleaming embroideries. By her were Lady Beecham and Mrs Drummond-Wolff in Punjabi dress, whilst many Indian ladies and children and a large number of retired Anglo-Indians found their way to the stall and a little Hindustani was exchanged with goodly sums.’26
Buoyed by her success, Sophia decided to do more. On 17 April 1917, she wrote to New Scotland Yard, asking for a licence to hold substantial street collections throughout the capital. The YMCA had planned a similar event for Indian soldiers earlier in the year but had lost interest in the venture. Sophia picked up the reins and decided to carry on without them. In her application, she informed the Metropolitan Police that all money raised would go towards buying decent waterproof shoes, warm clothes, chocolate and cigarettes for the soldiers. Her request seemed uncontroversial and, under normal circumstances, such a licence would have been granted without difficulty. Sophia’s letter however was immediately forwarded to the India Office for the attention of the Secretary of State himself. The police did not feel able to act without higher authority.
A flurry of communications followed between the commissioner, the India Office’s Political and Secret Department and the Secretary of State for India. After some deliberation it was decided that the princess ought to be dissuaded. The idea that the ungrateful suffragette from Hampton Court might receive plaudits for her war efforts was troubling to the Home Office. The India Office too had its own reasons to say no. While the Ghadars were agitating within the army, the last thing they needed was the granddaughter of Ranjit Singh to be lauded as a saviour of the very men they were sending to fight and die at the front. But how could they say no to such a laudable ambition without looking ridiculous?
A memo from the Political and Secret Department explained the dilemma and weighed up the dangers: ‘The original scheme, which was to have been worked by the YMCA, has evidently dropped. I don’t think the project, if it ever comes off, will be a success, but I don’t see how the Secretary of State can do anything, but “concur”. If there were any suspicion that the India Office looked askance at the proposals, the results would be serious.’27
But still the politicians and civil servants could not bring themselves to give Sophia the go-ahead. On 20 August, a further memo was sent to the police giving them possible grounds to turn her down: ‘Sir, in reply to your letter of the 16th inst GR 249504, regarding an application made on behalf of Princess Sophia Duleep Singh for permission to hold a street collection throughout London for the benefit of Indian troops, I am directed by the Secretary of State for India to say that it appears to him undesirable that such collection should be undertaken on the initiative of private persons. If it is decided to hold one for the purpose in question, he would prefer that the arrangements should be made by the committee of the Indian Soldiers’ Fund.’28
There were also rumours coming from Wh
itehall that the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, had already given his blessing to Sophia’s plans. If he had, then London was caught in a trap, and there was potential for great embarrassment, with the Secretary of State saying one thing and the Viceroy of India another. An urgent telegram was fired off to Delhi by Lord Wimborne, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He asked the Viceroy to think very carefully about what he may and may not have said about Sophia’s scheme: ‘has Princess Sophia Dileep [sic] Singh’s proposed Indian flag day [received] official approval? And asked to interest Viceroy of India in scheme (?) Please wire reply.’29
Days later, the Political and Secret Department found to its horror that it was not tacit approval from the Viceroy they had to worry about. Sir Arthur Hirtzel read with gloom that his own Secretary of State in London, the very man who was most against Sophia getting the credit for her fundraising plan, had himself praised her idea in a letter to a third party months before. The matter had entirely slipped his mind.
If the Secretary of State thought the idea had merit before Sophia’s name had been attached to it, and had wished it every success, he could not very well turn it down now. A new strategy had to be found quickly. Arthur Hirtzel drafted another letter to the head of the Metropolitan Police: ‘Sir, in reply to your letter, 16 August 1917, No GR 249504, I am directed to inform you that the Secretary of State for India in Council cannot support officially proposals of the kind indicated, for the benefit of Indian troops, but he does not wish to raise any objection to a collection being held by the YMCA, provided that it is clear that it is a private enterprise of that association and in no way connected with the India Office. The YMCA has already been acquainted informally with the Secretary of State’s views on the subject.’30
Suddenly, without explanation, the YMCA was again interested in plans it had rejected months before, and invited Sophia to be the honourable secretary of the venture. Oblivious to the machinations going on behind her back, she accepted and then got on with the business of organising her event. There were badges to make, tins and trays to be sourced and ranks of enthusiastic volunteers to enlist. She was happy because she felt useful. Activity took her out of the dreariness of Hampton Court and distracted her from the depression which often haunted her when she had time on her hands. The government too was pleased. The fundraising event for Indian soldiers would go ahead without the whiff of a Duleep Singh name about it. Sophia’s name would disappear in a long list of committee members. That was the plan anyway.