Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  The value of £1 in Raffles’ lifetime equates to between £80 and £95 in today’s money.

  Raffles in romantic mode, with an arm resting on his book The History of Java. This was painted in London by the fashionable portraitist James Lonsdale in 1817.

  Chapter 1

  The Boy from Walworth and the Circassian Bride

  London 1781–1805

  Raffles had brought the red carpet with him.

  He knew the importance of ceremony and etiquette when treating with the rulers of the Indian Archipelago. There were about one hundred and fifty people living on the island of Singapore: a few Chinese settlements in the forest and, on the shore, the Malay seagypsies who subsisted on fishing and piracy and whose activities were evident from the human skulls bobbing around in the shallow waters. A larger dwelling, back from the river which debouched into the bay, was that of the local governor, Temenggong Abdul Rahman of Johore. The ground beyond the sandy beach was partially cleared. All the rest was smothered in jungle.

  The squadron of eight vessels anchored offshore on 27 January 1819. Wa Hakim, a sea-gypsy boy, remembered watching the landing of two white men, a short one and a tall one, escorted by a sepoy. The tall man was Major William Farquhar. The short man was Sir Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen (Bengkulu). Raffles made a provisional treaty with the Temenggong, and gained permission to land troops with building materials, arms and stores, to pitch tents and lay out a fort.

  Tunku Long was one of two rival Sultans of Johore with pretensions to sovereignty over the island of Singapore. He arrived, was escorted out to the Raffles’ ship, and was received with every honour by Raffles who, according to a Malay historian, ‘told him everything, using courteous words, advising him, and paying him delicate compliments. And Tunku Long agreed to whatever Mr Raffles proposed.’

  On 6 February the Sultan and his party attired themselves for the Treaty ceremony, while Raffles, Farquhar, and all the military and ships’ officers gathered on the shore. Guns were fired, flags flew, sepoys were drawn up under arms. A hundred feet of the red carpet were unrolled. The Treaty document was read aloud, in English and then in Malay, signed by Raffles in the name of the East India Company, and sealed by the Sultan and the Temenggong.

  In the name of the Governor-General of Bengal, Tunku Long was declared to be ‘Sultan Hussein Shah in the state of Singapore and all its subject territories’, with the promise of five thousand Spanish dollars a year and the protection of the British. In return the British Government was granted exclusive rights to establish a settlement or ‘trading factory’ on the island. It was not a conquest. It was more like a leasehold purchase.

  This brief account of the founding of Singapore gives no idea of the political and personal machinations leading up to what seems a smooth operation, nor of the political storm which it caused. It does not convey the importance to the East India Company of establishing a safe haven and a profitable trading post midway on the trade route between India and China; nor the vision and verve which had made it possible. Raffles and Farquhar had brought it off. Given their different skills and temperaments, neither could have done it without the other.

  Major Farquhar remained on the island as Resident, with full authority and a raft of instructions from Raffles. He, the very next day, sailed away up the Strait of Malacca to another island, Penang, where his pregnant wife Sophia was waiting for him.

  Raffles was born on a different ocean, on 6 July 1781, off Port Morant on the south-east coast of Jamaica. His father, Benjamin Raffles, aged forty-two, was the English master of the West Indiaman Ann. The trade with Jamaica and the Caribbean, familiar to Benjamin Raffles over many years, was in sugar, rum, and slaves.

  His mother was Anne Lyde, in her mid-twenties. Her new baby was baptised when the Ann put in at Port Royal, further west on the Jamaican coast. He was christened Thomas Bingley Stamford: Thomas was the name of his paternal grandfather, Thomas Bingley was a London merchant friend and the boy’s godfather, and Thomas Stamford a doctor friend in Jamaica. The boy was called ‘Tom’ in the family.

  His mother’s eldest sister, Harriet, was married to John Lindeman. Of Dutch descent, with connections in the East Indies, he was rector of Eaton Bishop in Herefordshire. On a visit with his mother to the Herefordshire Lindemans when Tom was rising three, the boy – along with a younger sister, christened Harriet after her aunt Lindeman – was re-christened by his uncle and registered simply as ‘Thomas’ this time. Tom himself dropped ‘Bingley’ but always retained ‘Stamford’.

  After Tom and Harriet came Leonora, Maryanne (or Mary Anne or Marianne), Elizabeth (who died when she was four), another boy, Benjamin, who did not survive his first year; and Ann, who was always a problem. Maryanne was the prettiest and the most fun, and the closest to Tom. Thus he grew up the eldest and only boy with four younger sisters.

  Benjamin Raffles seems not to have made money by private trading, as most sea captains did. He had a good enough start in life, entering Christ’s Hospital, the ‘Blue Coat School’, in Newgate Street in London at the age of ten. The school was free, with a reputation for discipline and high standards, and admission was through recommendation from the parish of St Ann’s, Blackfriars, where he was baptised in 1739. He left at sixteen to become apprenticed to the master of a ship engaged in the slave trade, bound for Antigua. Ten years later, he was a ship’s master himself.

  The Raffleses were ordinary people with no family money and few influential connections. Tom’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Raffles, was for thirty years a clerk in Doctor’s Commons, which administered ecclesiastical and Admiralty courts. But the genes on each side produced eccentric talents, and Tom was one of three extraordinary first cousins born within a few years of each other. All three were intelligent, full of nervous energy, and ambitious to the point of assuming entitlement.

  One cousin was Elton Hamond, born in 1786, son of Elizabeth Lyde – another sister of Tom’s mother – married to Charles Hamond, a tea dealer in Milk Street, off Cheapside in the City. Elton had intense literary aspirations and was a compulsive unpublished autobiographer. Strikingly handsome and a seductive talker, he sought, successfully, the acquaintance of writers. He knew the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, and the diarist Crabb Robinson, who was fond of him but thought him insane. Elton believed that only he possessed the secret of rendering mankind perfect. At the age of thirty-five, deluded and depressed, he killed himself.

  The other significant cousin was another Thomas Raffles, born 1788, son of Captain Benjamin’s half-brother William, a solicitor, and his wife Rachel. They lived in east London in Princes (later Princelet) Street in Spitalfields, where William was a vestry clerk at Christ Church. Theirs was a religious household, and Thomas joined the ministry of the dissenting Congregational church, having a startling gift for oratory at a time when evangelical preachers were celebrities, attracting huge followings. Based at the Great George Street Chapel in Liverpool, the Rev. Thomas Raffles D.D., LL.D, travelled throughout Britain and abroad, often preaching three times in one day for an hour and a half at a time. Cousin Thomas performed in the pulpit like an actor. ‘Oh! what a vapour is popularity!’ he wrote, inhaling, and praying for humility. He wrote books, had a fine library, antiquarian interests, and was a collector of manuscripts and of autographs.

  The destiny of Thomas Stamford Raffles was unlike that of either of these younger cousins, to both of whom he was close. But there is something visionary and driven in the nature of each of the three which resonates disturbingly.

  When they were all young, Tom’s family lived in Walworth, a Surrey village south of the City of London across the river. East Street (or East Lane), off the village street, was part of a development which, in the course of the nineteenth century, would see Walworth join up with Camberwell and both become swallowed up by the capital – its population under one million in 1801, in a country of just over eight million. Tom Raffles’ childhood
was about thirty years earlier than the period in which Dickens’s Great Expectations is set, but when Pip walks out from the City to have supper with Mr Wemmick and his Aged Parent in Walworth, the village still ‘appeared to be a collection of back lanes, ditches, and little gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement.’ But just north of Walworth, the Elephant and Castle coaching inn presided over a congested traffic junction where converging horse-drawn vehicles clattered into the capital over Blackfriars Bridge, or through the Southwark tollgate up the Borough Road and over London Bridge.

  East Street petered out towards the Thames through farms and market gardens, and Tom will have seen sheep and cows from the back windows. Cousin Thomas remembered visiting when he was a boy of nine or ten and Tom a teenager, and ‘flying my kyte with him in the neighbouring fields.’ The main street was ‘lined by elegant mansions.’ Walworth Common provided nineteen marshy acres of green space.

  ‘As a schoolboy, his garden was his delight: to this was added a love of animals,’ wrote his second wife Sophia Raffles in her Memoir of her late husband, reporting what Cousin Thomas had told her. There were people in Walworth to sow the seeds of Tom Raffles’ later passion for natural history. James Maddock, the author of The Florist’s Directory: or Treatise on the Culture of Flowers, had a famous plant nursery there. Another local florist – ‘florist’ being the contemporary term for ‘horticulturist’ – was Samuel Curtis, a couple of years younger than Tom, who had acquired his own nursery in Walworth by the time he was twenty-one. Curtis became the proprietor of the Botanical Magazine, and in 1810 – six years sooner than Raffles – a member of the Linnean Society.

  Tom Raffles would have known the Cuming family, and handled the strange objects in their house just across the road from East Street, on the corner of Manor Row. Richard and Henry Cuming, father and son, were amassing a collection of curiosities – a jumble of old bones, teeth, coins, ornaments, textiles, animal skulls and skeletons, fossils, artefacts and weapons, from all over the world. Raffles, in an age of collectors, was to become a collector of distinction.

  Further afield, for an entrance fee of one shilling, a curious wandering boy could see wild animals from faraway countries – another personal passion when he himself was in the East – by crossing the Thames and visiting Edward Cross’s menagerie in Exeter Change on the Strand, where a tiger, a hyena, and other beasts were kept in iron cages on an upper floor, their howls audible from the street.

  Tom had almost no formal education. When he was twelve he went to the Mansion House Boarding School on King Street in the village of Hammersmith. It was a typical small, inexpensive private school of the kind which prepared boys for clerkships, or the armed services or, at a pinch, Oxford or Cambridge, offering Latin and Greek, French, arithmetic, book-keeping and geography. Tom was only there for two years. In a long autobiographical letter to Cousin Thomas (henceforth cited as ‘the letter of 14 October 1819’), he admitted: ‘The deficiency of my early education has never been supplied, and I have never ceased to deplore the necessity which withdrew me so early from school.’ It was a question of money.

  His father Benjamin seems to have sold the Ann the year after Tom’s birth. Ships’ captains were young, and getting younger. Something went very wrong in later life for Captain Benjamin Raffles. Tom was devoted to his mother, but not a single written word about his father, by him or anyone else in the family, has survived. The Captain or his wife must have found other sources of income, as the girls had some education. They wrote good letters in good handwriting, and had the necessary refinement as they grew older to mix comfortably with privileged people.

  There were seafaring people on their mother Anne (Lyde)’s side as well as their father’s, but it seems not to have been suggested that Tom should go to sea. He was small and slight and not robust. He had to get a job.

  Uncle Charles Hamond, Elton’s father, through his tea business had contacts in India House, the headquarters of the East India Company on Leadenhall Street in the City. Another connection was his godfather Bingley, whose son – another Thomas – was an insurance broker with enough shares in the East India Company to qualify him for a vote in the General Court of Proprietors.

  There were no formal qualifications for employment in the Company. The only way in was through patronage – who you knew. To solicit employment for one’s sons, brothers, brothers-in-law or nephews was perfectly acceptable. There were multi-generational Company dynasties, such as the Dundas family.

  Uncle Charles Hamond, probably with Bingley’s aid, paid the necessary bond and secured for Thomas Stamford Raffles the position of ‘Extra Clerk’ in India House. With a salary of £50 a year, this was a precarious position, the lowest step on a ladder which rose to heights far beyond the line of sight of the boy from Walworth who entered the portals of India House for the first time in 1795. He was fourteen, which was young but not unusually so. In 1809 the Company opened their East India College at Haileybury to prepare boys for service out East. The idea was that the students, nominated by Directors, should be either from families already connected with the Company, or fine examples of young British manhood from the landed gentry. Tom Raffles, on the face of it, was not the sort of youth anyone in the Company would expect to be a high-flyer.

  Queen Elizabeth I had granted a Charter in 1600 to a group of London merchants, guaranteeing them a monopoly on all English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The most valuable trade from the East was spices, for which Dutch traders were charging exorbitantly on the European market.

  The Dutch East India Company – the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC, was established two years after the British East India Company, and was a larger organisation in terms of shipping and tonnage. The VOC had its own East Indian capital on the coast of Java, at Batavia (Jakarta). The VOC crashed, and was dissolved in 1800, but with no diminution to Dutch trading activity and territorial ambition in the East Indies. There was also a French East India Company, and a small Danish East India Company.

  The main spices were, from the beginning, nutmeg, clove, mace, cinnamon. Of these nutmeg, Myristica fragrans, was originally the most expensive and the most desired. Pepper became equally important. Although spices remained a core trade, by Raffles’ time tea had taken over as the most profitable commodity (with opium, exported to China from Bengal, an uneasy second). Tea came only from China, and the China trade was expanding – East Indiamen brought back not only tea but also silks and porcelain, painted wallpapers, ivories and lacquered objects, fuelling a fashion for chinoiserie.

  By the turn of the nineteenth century there was a trade gap. Private fortunes could still be made, but for the Company there was a limited market in South Asia and China for British woollens and metals, which was all that the Company could think of sending out. So its operations required huge injections of capital. Money made trading from Bengal, and quantities of silver bullion from London, financed goods from China which were wanted at home. Indian cottons and muslins were re-exported from London to China and West Africa, but did not close the gap.

  The Company, too big to fail, continued to expand. In the years immediately after Raffles came to work there, India House was remodelled and enlarged. The facade was widened and a pillared portico added, topped by a pediment embellished with a statue of the reigning monarch, George III, flanked by emblems of commerce and topped by Britannia. Off the central corridor on the ground floor was the Court Room, a thirty-foot cube with double tiers of windows, where the Court of Directors met every Wednesday, sitting round a horseshoe-shaped table.

  Another large room off the corridor was the Proprietors’ General Court Room. The Proprietors were the shareholders – people in banking, shipping and commerce, and retired ‘nabobs’ who had made their pile out East. To the left of the corridor was the Sale Room, where imported commodities were auctioned to dealers and wholesalers; and committee rooms for the thirteen committees, of which the three-man Secret Committee was the most prest
igious.

  Grandiosity was defying decline and loss of independence. For in 1784 the Government imposed upon the Company a seven-man Board of Control, with statutory access to its reports and accounts, in order to restrict its geopolitical autonomy. The East India Company’s powers were eroded with every statutory renewal of its Charter, although in Raffles’ time there was still an inextricable co-dependency between Company and Crown. The Company was also the largest single employer in the country. In 1785 it employed over fifteen hundred in London alone, which doubled by 1813: not only clerks and administrators but labourers, cleaners, porters, packers, watchmen, warehousemen, chandlers, carters and carriers, dockers and shipbuilders. The Cornish tin and copper mines depended on the Company for its markets. It has been estimated that as many as thirty thousand people in Britain were in some way dependent on the Company.

  The Chairman of the Government-appointed Board of Control had a seat in Cabinet, thus acquiring political clout while subjecting the Company’s affairs to supervision. Company interests were heavily represented in Parliament. Company and Crown wrangled over which had legal right to the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The Government, which depended on the Company’s experience and establishments, had no wish to take over the administration of Company possessions in India and the Indian Archipelago, but the Chairman of the Board of Control influenced the appointment of new Directors. Crown approval was required for the appointment of Governors-General. The Board of Control had the right to communicate directly with the Secret Committee, and with India, without going through the usual channels.