by A. N. Wilson
By 1886, the adoption of the Bonsack machinery by Wills had been followed by firms such as Lambert and Butler (London), John Player and Sons (Nottingham) and the Liverpool firms Hignett Bros and Cope Bros. These Liverpool factories competed for the franchise to display and sell cheap cigarettes in the Railway Refreshment Rooms. Spiers and Pond, the company who ran all the refreshment rooms for the Midland Railways, sold the right to Cope Brothers for £800 p.a.
A price war in the 1880s led to the ‘penny cigarettes’. In 1888, Wild Woodbine made its appearance, the most famous cheap smoke in the Western world, forever associated with the men fighting in the trenches a quarter of a century later. It was during this price war that Wills watched their profits rocket – £6.5 million in 1884, £13,961,000 in 1886, shooting to nearly £127 million in 1891. The working classes had become hooked. This was the true opium of the people, and Gloag’s legacy of the cigarette habit could be said to be the most lasting and notable consequence of the Crimean War. When the Turkish, Russian and British empires are now as obsolete as the Bonapartist dynasty, the British working class, 146 years after the treaty of Paris, are still addicts of what Gloag brought home – though in other classes the custom, like its adherents, is dying.
One man who was quick to adopt the cigarette habit was Emperor Napoleon III. When Prince Albert and Queen Victoria visited Paris in 1855 they found him chain-smoking.fn2 They brought with them three hundred and sixty photographs of the Crimean campaign taken by Roger Fenton – one of the more successful photographers in that war. Probably the Romanian court painter Carol Popp de Szathmari took more dramatic shots, including scenes of battle, but only one of his photographs has survived.35 This is a splendid old Turkish irregular soldier, a Bashi-Bazouk, lolling beside a bare-chested female companion. Szathmari’s albums belonging to Napoleon III were probably consumed by fire when Communards burnt the Tuileries in 1871. The army photographer Richard Nicklin and two assistants in the Royal Engineers drowned, with sixteen cases of equipment, in Balaclava harbour when their ship, the Rip Van Winkle, was sunk on 14 November 1854.36
Fenton was a commercial photographer who saw the war as a chance to practise his (comparatively) new hobby. We exclaim at his prints, as at those of James Robertson (an Englishman based at Constantinople): but they are nearly all portraits, and only a very few, if the truth is told, actually convey much of the atmosphere of the war. These are such as Private Soldiers and Officers of the 3rd Regiment (The Buffs) Piling Arms,37 Carts and Cattle leaving Balaklava harbour,38 Mounted French Infantry Officer39 (his képi on one side of his head, the cigarette in his mouth, the pointed bell-tents smudgy behind him on the hillside).
Action photographs were barely a technical possibility. All these photographers used the wet-plate solution which had been developed in 1852 by Scott Archer, an Englishman. A glass plate was immersed in collodion, a solution of ether, guncotton and alcohol, which was blended with silver iodide and iodide of iron. Then the plate was sensitized by means of a coating of silver nitrate solution. The wet plate was then placed inside the camera. Exposure took between three and twenty seconds, which accounts for the air of frozen stillness in most of these frames. The plate then had to be removed at once to a dark room, which is why photographers in the Crimea were encumbered with, in Szathmari’s case, a carriage, in Fenton’s with a specially covered van. Whereas wet collodion plates in England would probably be usable for up to ten minutes, in the heat of a Crimean summer they dried almost instantaneously.
So, the wonder is that we have any plates at all of the Crimean War. We do, however. Lord Raglan, Sir George de Lacy Evans, Sir James Scarlett, General Sir John Lysaght Pennefather, Sir John Campbell with the Light Company of the 38th (South Staffordshires), Omar Pasha and the French Zouaves all stare into Fenton’s lens. Wherever his van (overpoweringly hot in that sweltering summer) turned up, the soldiers clustered round, wanting to be immortalized. They stare at us, or so it seems, just as much as we stare at them. Clearly, Fenton has managed to freeze certain moments in the past, but what strikes us more forcibly is their wistfulness as they look at us, and the future.
fn1 The invention of James A. Bonsack of Salem, Va.
fn2 Prince Albert, who abominated the habit, did not join him. As his verse biographer, the Rev. Paul Johnson, aged 94, recalled,
The Prince a singular example set
And smoked not e’en a fragrant cigarette,
Nor feared to give his royal host offence
As deemed unsocial in this abstinence.
15
India 1857–9
ON 9 MAY 1857, in the parade-ground at Meerut, some forty miles north-east of Delhi, a melancholy scene was enacted beneath the rolling stormclouds and the sunless sky. Eighty-five sepoy troops were being stripped of their uniforms – for which they had themselves paid – and handed over to blacksmiths who riveted fetters on their arms and legs. These were no common criminals. Lieutenant (later General) Sir Hugh Gough, who was in Meerut that day, believed they ‘were more or less picked men, and quite the élite of the corps’.1 How did it come about that these proud soldiers, who had fought so bravely for the East India Company in the Sikh wars in the Punjab less than a decade before, found themselves humiliated and paraded before their comrades like common criminals? What was their offence?
The new Enfield rifle with which they had been issued could not be loaded unless each and every cartridge had its end bitten off before insertion into the gun. These sepoys had refused, fearing that the grease used on the cartridge came from the fat of an animal forbidden in the dietary laws of their religion. Their commanding officer, Colonel Carmichael Smyth of the 3rd Native Cavalry, was a choleric, unpopular figure. On 23 April he had ordered a parade to demonstrate the use of the new cartridges and a method by which they could be used without biting. It was not in itself an ill-intentioned idea, but as many of the colonel’s fellow officers observed, it was crashingly tactless and almost bound to have a disastrous consequence. Ever since the new rifle, with its notoriously greased cartridges, had been introduced to the subcontinent, there had been rumours flying. In January, at Dum-Dum, a low-caste lascar was said to have approached a Brahmin sepoy who worked in the musketry department and told him that the grease used for these cartridges – which had to be put in the soldier’s mouth before he loaded his rifle – was made from the fats of forbidden beasts – beef dripping would have most alarmed the Hindus, pork fat the Muslims.
Incredibly – given the sensitivity of dietary matters in religion – it seems as though forbidden fats had, in some instances, been used to grease the cartridges, though as soon as the mistake was noticed the East India Company gave strict orders that the cartridges should be greased with a mixture of tallow (sheep fat) and beeswax.2 But the rumours were now ablaze. It was widely reported among the sepoy regiments that the British had deliberately engineered a situation in which Hindus would eat beef fat in order to make Christians of them. Although this was not true, it was not so preposterous a suggestion in 1857 as it might have been in the time of Warren Hastings. Lord Dalhousie in his time as governor-general (1848–56) had been a modernizer, an improver, a moral policeman. The Evangelical desire to improve met the Benthamite ambition to organize the lives of others and together they found a perfect object for their busybodydom: Indian religion. William Wilberforce said he really put the conversion of India to Christianity ‘before Abolition’ (of slavery) as a task for God and His Englishmen. What were the Hindu divinities after all but ‘absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty. In short, their religious system is one grand abomination.’3 James Mill lost his faith in God while writing his Indian history, but that classic textbook was to tell generations of Englishmen that ‘by a system of priestcraft, built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind, their minds were enchained more intolerably than their bodies; in short that, despotism and priestcraft taken together, the Hindus, in mind and body, w
ere the most enslaved portion of the human race’.4
When Viscount Canning took over the governor-generalship of the Company in 1856, he particularly disliked evangelical British army officers, ‘terribly given to preach’.5 Lt-Col. Wheeler of the 34th’s ‘whole mind’ was ‘given to religious teaching’. Patronizingly, Canning thought the sepoys ‘curious creatures … just like children. Ombrageux is the word for them I think. Shadows and their own fancies seem to frighten them much more than realities.’6
As well as fears, in the late 1850s the sepoys had cause for discontent. As the great Indian scholar S.B. Chaudhuri noted, it was not so much the fear for their religion that provoked the rural classes and their landed chiefs to revolt: ‘It was the question of their rights and interests in the soil and hereditary holdings which excited them to a dangerous degree.’7 The British under Dalhousie had taken over the property of many of the Indian landowners. The rents were now fixed by the East India Company.
The sepoy armies were of use to the Company not merely to police the territories already occupied by the British but also to conquer and subdue more – for example the garrisons of Lower Burma. For Indian troops to be moved efficiently and speedily to Burma it had been deemed necessary by the British to insist on the abolition, or ignoring, of the caste system in such areas as military transport. These ‘common-sense’ reforms were much resented, especially by Brahmin sepoys who objected for example to having to travel alongside Sikhs. The British need to ‘transform the loosely disciplined mercenary army which had survived since the time of Clive into a modern force yielding unhesitating obedience’ meant inevitably that Indian sensitivities would be trampled or tormented.8
Who were the sepoys? Many were ‘distressed gentlefolk’ whose families could no longer make a living from the land, or perhaps had been impoverished by British land reform. The Bengal army was largely recruited from a limited number of districts in Southern Oudh, the eastern regions of the North-Western provinces and Western Bihar, where Brahmins and Rajputs (who claimed descent from the ancient Kshatriya soldier caste) belonged to proprietary brotherhoods of small landowners. Military service was a dignified option for these men. Out of their 7 to 9 rupees per month, they had to pay for food, uniform, and transport of baggage. After the wars of conquest and expansion in the Punjab were over, the British cut the allowances to their sepoy troops and hinted that ‘foreign’ troops, for example the Gurkhas, could be recruited more cheaply if the Brahmins and Rajputs did not want the work. The sepoy was therefore torn, at this period, between a need to make a living and a profound resentment at the high-handed reforms of the British, especially when these reforms were made in the name of Western progress. If 1857 was something more than a disturbance among the troops, if it was a rising against the angreezi raj, or English rule, then it was very much a revolt against the Modern. The aggrieved sepoys had more than a little in common with the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire put out of work by machines; with the dispossessed working classes of England who found themselves forced into Benthamite workhouses; with the Irish whose right to their own religion, and even life itself, was questioned in some English quarters; with Canadians and Jamaicans whose livelihood was wrecked by Free Trade; and with those many Radicals and Chartists who demonstrated and petitioned not so much for the creation of a brave new future as for a share of the freedoms they had enjoyed in the past and which the March of the Modern had taken away from them.
So here are the eighty-five sepoys standing in the parade-ground in Meerut in the sweltering, thunderous, sunless heat while the stormclouds gather: eighty-five brave, old-fashioned fighting men manacled like disgraced slaves and marched to the prison house before the shocked gaze of their comrades. Rather fewer than 2,000 sepoys witnessed the spectacle. That evening one of the native officers went to Hugh Gough, who was sitting on the veranda of his bungalow, to warn him that there would be a mutiny of the native troops at Meerut the next day. Gough was an intelligent man who knew that since the discontents at Dum-Dum in January there had been minor mutinies at Barrackpur and Berhampur, and a serious uprising of the 48th Native Cavalry at Lucknow.9 He went at once to Colonel Carmichael Smyth, who reproved him for listening ‘to such idle words’. Later in the evening Gough tried to persuade some of the other senior British officers at Meerut – Brigadier Archdale Wilson and Major-General W.H. Hewitt, commander of the Meerut Division – but they too dismissed the suggestion.
The mutiny began the next day, a swelteringly hot day, so hot that the evening church parade was postponed from half-past six to seven o’clock. Before the padre had time to implore the Deity to deliver the Christians from all the perils and dangers of that night, billows of smoke were rising into the torrid air from the bungalows which had been set alight. The sowars of the 3rd Cavalry rode to the prison to release their eighty-five humiliated comrades. Young Gough – subsequently to win a VCfn1 – and Major Tombs rallied the European troops. Many of the Native troops were on the European side. The colonel of the 11th Native Infantry galloped across to see what ‘all the noise was about’ and was shot on the parade ground. Mayhem broke out, with Colonel Carmichael Smyth conspicuous by his Duke of Plaza Toro-like skill in taking cover and spending the night in the safety of the cantonment under the protection of the Artillery.10
During a night of fires and violence the rabble from the bazaars of Meerut swarmed over the military quarters, looting and killing. Wajir Ali Khan, deputy collector, afterwards gave evidence that though plunder was going on all night the sepoys did not touch a thing.11 Gough later said that none of the sepoys in the 11th or the 3rd murdered their own officers. By morning, however, some fifty Europeans, men, women and children, had been killed. Gough had ridden through the baying lines of the 20th Native Infantry as they called out Maro! Maro! – Kill! Kill! – but, though he survived, he could see that they were out of control.
Moreover, it was obvious that the mutineering sepoys were now in the reckless position of having nothing to lose. Whether they surrendered or pleaded for clemency, they knew that the gallows or the firing squad inevitably awaited them. They might as well fight on. The Europeans listened to the shouting of slogans, the crackling of flames, the cry of ‘Yah! Ali! Ali! e nara Haidari!’12 The Indians were crying out that they had ‘broken the Electric Telegraph and overturned the British Rule, and boasting they had committed these atrocities in the name of religion’.
By morning, the mutineers had escaped Meerut and had ridden off to Delhi. The Meerut outbreak, however unpleasant in itself, might have been seen as no more than a summer heat-storm had the fire of discontent not spread. ‘Oh why did you have a parade?’ wailed General Hewitt to the colonel. By then the rebels had proclaimed the last Moghul emperor, eighty-two-year-old Bahadur Shah II, the king of Delhi. The sepoy mutineers also issued the following proclamation:
To all Hindoos and Mussulmans, Citizens and Servants of Hindostan, the officers of the Army now at Delhi and Meerut send greeting:
It is well known that in these days all the English have entertained these evil designs – first, to destroy the religion of the whole Hindostani army, and then to make the people by compulsion Christians. Therefore we, solely on account of our religion, have combined with the people, and have not spared alive one infidel, and have re-established the Delhi dynasty on these terms. Hundreds of guns and a large amount of treasure have fallen into our hands; therefore it is fitting that whoever of the soldiers and people dislike turning Christians should unite with one heart, and, acting courageously, not leave the seed of these infidels remaining … It is … necessary that all Hindoos and Mussulmans unite in this struggle and, following the instructions of some respectable people, keep themselves secure so that good order may be maintained.
For ninety years after 1857, the British liked to represent the terrible events of that summer as ‘the Indian Mutiny’. It was necessary for the British self-image that the outbreaks of incendiarism and violence should have been of a purely military character, an ab
erration by a few fanatics who (mistakenly, of course) believed that they were being asked to put the fat of forbidden meats in their mouths. These maniacs – so the British historians saw things – were prepared to reverse all the benefits of civilization which had been brought to them by the East India Company for the sake of returning to the most superstitious adherence to a backward-looking religion. They were a few diehards discontented with army life. The huge majority of Indians, it is averred in this notion of events, recognized that the British administered their land and their institutions far more fairly than the corrupt princelings of the decayed Indian dynasties, whether Moghul or Mahratta.
At the other extreme are to be found the Indian nationalist historians who liked to see 1857 as the first serious attempt at a united Independence Movement for the subcontinent. For these historians, the Delhi Declaration is of the utmost significance, giving the lie to the British supposition that Hindu and Muslim could never coexist without a European administration keeping the peace. They would link the Delhi declaration to the momentous Calcutta Congress of 1886 whose spirit was captured by the Nawab Reza Ali-Khan, Bahadur of Lucknow, who said – in Urdu – ‘Hindus or Mahomedans, Parsees or Sikhs, we are one people now, whatever our ancestors six or eight hundred years ago may have been, and our public interests are indivisible and identical … we Mahomedans (at least such of us as can think at all) think just as all thinking Hindus do on these public questions.’
Most Indian historians today view with some scepticism the notion that 1857 was Act One of the Independence Drama. But its memory undoubtedly fuelled later supporters of the Freedom Movement, just as the memories of the Famine shaped the development of Irish Republicanism. Had the events of 1857 been no more than a mutiny, then there would not have been places, such as Banda and Hamirpur, where civilian mobs rose against the British without military assistance.13 If, however, one tries to see these uprisings as part of a concerted Independence movement, it is difficult to explain why the greater part of the subcontinent was unaffected. The conflict was a phenomenon of the North-West of India, and central North-West at that. It never spread up as far as Lahore in the Punjab, nor – by a mixture of good luck and clever tactics by the British – did it ever reach the administrative capital, Calcutta. Bombay, Hyderabad, Mysore, the Carnatic, Ceylon remained all but unaffected by the bloody events.