by Anand, Anita
In Folkestone, during the first week of September 1887, Sophia began to feel unwell. At first the symptoms were fairly mild, a slightly raised temperature, an intermittent cough, a general malaise. The sea air of the Oliphants’ home ought to have given the young girl rosy cheeks and rude health, yet she was pale, exhausted and suffering constant throbbing headaches. Her joints ached and her stomach was upset and sore. The princess’s condition deteriorated rapidly and by 17 September, Sophia was diagnosed as being in the full grip of typhoid fever, the illness which had killed Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, some twenty-six years before.
Sophia drifted in and out of delirium, passing from periods of calm exhaustion to serious agitation, numerous times a day. Tender rose-coloured spots appeared on her chest and abdomen and she found it difficult to swallow or keep down water. Slowly she lost awareness of her surroundings as she battled dehydration. When the news of her goddaughter’s illness reached the Queen, she sent her own physician, Dr William Gull. It was a generous gesture but a futile one, since by the time the doctor reached Folkestone events had already taken a tragic, if unexpected, turn.
On 17 September, Maharani Bamba, distraught and weeping, stayed by her daughter’s bedside all night, praying for her fever to break. As Sophia drifted in and out of consciousness, her mother chose to dismiss the other servants and tend to her alone, just as she had when Sophia was a baby. It was a long and frightening night during which it often seemed as if her child might die.
There is no record of who came into Sophia’s bedroom first the next morning, although the Queen received a comprehensive report of the scene that was discovered. Sophia, whose breathing had been so laboured the night before, was sleeping peacefully, her fever having broken at some point in the night. On the floor by her bed lay her mother, cold and dead. Sometime during her long vigil, the Maharani Bamba had collapsed and slipped into a coma. She had stopped breathing just before dawn. Dr Gull reported that the Maharani had suffered comprehensive renal failure brought on by an acute case of diabetes, exacerbated by her drinking and the stress of her daughter’s illness.
When Queen Victoria received a telegram at Balmoral later that same day informing her of the tragedy, the Duleep Singhs were already foremost in her mind, thanks to the Maharajah’s latest public denunciation of the British sovereign’s reign. The Queen noted in her journal for that day: ‘The unfortunate Maharajah Duleep Singh has published a most violent, crazy letter, speaking of being “the lawful Sovereign of the Sikhs” and “England’s implacable foe”!! Heard this evening that his poor abandoned wife, the Maharani Bamba had died quite suddenly yesterday. How terrible for the poor children, who are quite fatherless and motherless!’29
When Duleep heard the news of his wife’s death, he wrote a simple one-line telegram to his eldest son: ‘Heart-broken – can’t realise – will write next week.’30 But his words came as scant comfort to his ‘childies’, whom he had so resolutely abandoned, along with their mother.
Queen Victoria voiced the feelings of many when she wrote about the tragedy to her daughter, Princess Beatrice: ‘The poor Maharani died of all the worries she went through and his desertion of her. The children (of whom there are 6!) – will be well cared for, have good guardians and allowance and kind people with them and I shall see them whenever I can. Would to God! I had done some more of late with the poor Maharajah! But really the family had become so large and so much to do about them that it was difficult to do and besides the extreme shyness of the Maharani made it more difficult to see much of them.’31
6
The Old Nature Rises
Bamba was buried on 23 September 1887. Dressed in the black of mourning, and heavy with despair, Sophia watched as her mother was transported by a special train from Folkestone to her final resting place, a churchyard in Thetford, across the road from their old home of Elveden. Her coffin was borne on the shoulders of men who had until recently toiled in her husband’s fields. Within view of the old house, in the shadow of the unprepossessing St Andrew’s church, the Maharani was given a simple funeral. The engraving on her plain headstone read: ‘In Memory of Bamba Duleep Singh, Maharanee. Born July 6th 1848 died September 18th 1887. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. God is Love.’1 Sophia and Edward placed small bouquets on the coffin.
Duleep, whose ambitions had now taken him to Russia, did not return for his wife’s funeral. Even though Queen Victoria let it be known that she would not have stopped him from paying his final respects, the Maharajah insisted he could not travel to the land of his mortal enemy. There was, however, another, less grandiose reason preventing him from leaving the shabby Moscow guesthouse which now served as his home. Marini Ada was six months pregnant.
The Maharajah’s absence was made all the more intolerable when on the very day of the funeral, the estate manager at Elveden received a letter asking him to retrieve Bamba’s old saddle from the stables. ‘Setting aside all political affairs for some time to come, I am going to indulge in some splendid sport in the Caucuses, the sportsman’s paradise,’2 he wrote. Presumably Duleep thought Ada might now get some use out of it after having her baby. He would later insist that his letter was sent before he knew of his wife’s death.
Sophia withdrew completely into her own world after the death of her mother. Already weak from her illness, grief only drained her further. Her mother left behind a modest estate worth just over £2,000,3 most of which had only survived Duleep’s withdrawals because it had been invested in long-term interests.
Soon after the funeral, Victor and Freddie returned to Sandhurst and Cambridge and it was left to Arthur Oliphant to once again step into the parental breach. He gathered up Sophia and Eddie and took them back home with him to Folkestone. Although he felt no great bond with Catherine and Bamba, at sixteen and eighteen respectively they had nowhere else to go, so they too became part of his household. As Oliphant would soon explain to the Queen’s private secretary: ‘The poor children have really no friends to whom they are attached. They exhibited considerable pleasure when I told them two days ago that Mrs Oliphant and I had consented to continue to take charge of them, and they told nurse afterwards that they did want to express how pleased they felt, but that they did not know how to express themselves – I think perhaps their pleasure was because they were not to be handed over to strangers rather than owing to any feelings of real attachment to us. It is early days to judge of them, for they are not communicative or demonstrative.’4
Arthur knew that the Oliphant family home in Folkestone could only be a temporary residence for the children; the place would be for ever associated with their mother’s death and it held a particular horror for Sophia. While a more suitable home was sought, he tried to handle his wards’ grief with a light touch and sensitivity. He would suggest rather than demand, whisper rather than shout. It took many weeks to break through the children’s defences, but finally in January, Arthur was able to deliver some good news:
19th January 1888
My dear Sir, I think Lord Henniker explained to the Queen the reason why I did not write last month. I am glad now to report for the information of Her Majesty that the Elder Princesses Duleep Singh have continued their studies with unabated interest and diligence. They, by their own request, have added Latin to their other subjects of study, and their Governess reports that they are making satisfactory progress generally. In music they are particularly persevering and painstaking. Princess Sophy and little Prince Edward, together with our own little son, have for several weeks past had a daily Governess to themselves and we could not desire that they should make faster progress. The dancing lessons of which they have had some 3 dozen are stopped for the present: They have all made excellent progress in dancing, and all enjoy it.5
The Oliphants’ gentle patience was working. Not even when their brother Victor urged a stricter approach to his wayward sisters did Arthur resort to imposing more rigid discipline: ‘Victor is eviden
tly a little disappointed that Bamba and Catherine have not yet been persuaded “to do up their hair” and to adopt the wearing of corsets. Mrs Oliphant has of course lost no opportunity to put before them these little matters but she has not attempted to coerce them. We think it better to give plenty of time and the prejudiced views they entertain for these things will dissolve when we get them to associate with us and our friends and young people of their own ages.’6 Only on one issue did Arthur insist on being obeyed. Sophia and Edward had a habit of sleeping with their bedroom windows wide open, no matter how inclement the weather. Arthur believed that this was the cause of their seemingly continual coughs and colds. ‘The Doctor has at last positively forbidden open windows when there’s a frost and a biting east wind,’7 he declared triumphantly.
The scrutiny the children received under the Oliphants’ care fitted wider Palace and government schemes very well; throughout, the Duleep Singh offspring were kept under careful watch. Early in their association, Arthur Oliphant had identified worrying traits in the elder daughters, which he reported in his letters to the Queen. ‘I am very sorry to find,’ he wrote, ‘that they certainly hold some of their father’s views with respect to his grievances and wrongs he believes to have been inflicted on him by the British government.’8 All the children expressed resentment towards the country in which they lived and their hatred of the English. ‘Even the youngest girl Sophy in her play with Edward and our own boy speaks of “those horrid English who would not let them all go to live in India, but stopped them at Aden”’.9
The ‘old nature’ that their mother Bamba had worried about in Sophia’s infancy seemed to be taking over, and that Arthur could not allow. The desire to Anglicise the children was as strong in Oliphant as it had been in Sir John Login when he first took charge of Sophia’s father as a boy back in India in 1849. Finally, after much careful consideration, it was decided the children needed a new start, a move to Brighton was approved. Arthur was convinced that the clean air, sea views, peace and quiet might allow the children to regroup without distraction. Only when he could promise them a life away from Folkestone and its terrible memories did he finally break the news that their beloved nanny Miss Date was never to return. The older sisters wept bitterly at the news of her death, but Sophia registered no response. Grief, it seemed, had numbed her.
Once Brighton was established as their new home, Arthur Oliphant felt the best way to rehabilitate his youngest charges was to plunge them into their education and separate them from the older girls. Sophia would be sent to a nearby girls’ day school, run by a kindly but strict mistress, Miss Parkinson. Edward would be prepared for the rigours of Eton by way of a small boarding school, Sandroyd in Suffolk. Both Bamba and Catherine were swiftly enrolled at Somerville College, Oxford – an institution which had recently and controversially been established to educate girls to the same level as undergraduate boys – even though, at seventeen, Catherine was rather young to be sent to university. It was decided that the princesses might otherwise negatively affect the impressionable young Sophia. Arthur also hoped that the experience might humble the haughty senior sisters.
Sophia would need far closer attention and careful care. She was regressing into a pronounced state of infantilised insecurity. She craved physical contact with her family, sitting so close to them that her body was almost welded to whoever was next to her. In photographs from the time, she leaves no space between herself and her brother Edward. She also struggles to look directly into the camera, tilting her head down or else looking away to the side, as if attempting to disappear entirely from view.
The separation from her sisters, when it came, was as painful for Catherine and Bamba as it was for Sophia. Before the girls left for university, they promised to bridge the distance with regular and detailed correspondence. Letters from Sophia would provide great solace for them in the difficult months that were to follow, for at Somerville, Catherine and Bamba were accorded no significant favours. If Arthur Oliphant’s aim had been to cut them down to size, it worked: photographs taken at Somerville College in 1888 show Bamba and her sister looking diffident. Visibly marked out by their ethnicity and their diminutive size, they struggled to fit in with the more assured young women who surrounded them. Catherine and Bamba looked and acted more like grave and suspicious children than students eager to learn.
Catherine found the change in her circumstances hardest to bear. When she was not with her sister, she spent her time with Lina Schaeffer,10 the young German governess who had been appointed to look after them when they became wards of the Palace. Although her teaching duties were no longer required, Arthur Oliphant sent Miss Schaeffer to settle them in at university, and Lina rarely left Catherine’s side.
Meanwhile in Brighton, Sophia struggled to keep up with her lessons. Her guardians were kind, but there was little intimacy, and she had few friends of her own age. After school, she would return to the Oliphant house in Brighton where tutors tried to polish off her rough edges. She was given intensive lessons in music, dance and deportment, in an attempt to transform her from an odd, ungainly child into a refined young lady. Despite her late start in learning, Arthur was delighted to discover that Sophia had a gift for music. She made swift progress at the piano and pleased her tutors with her diligence.
With all her siblings now living away, Sophia found that she had somehow become the very centre of her family. All of her brothers and sisters would write to her, expecting her to disseminate important news to the other Duleep Singhs.11 Sophia was relied upon to keep everyone up to date with family matters and to deal with the tedious practicalities that none of the others could be bothered with. In particular she became indispensable to young Prince Edward.
‘Dear Sophy,’ he wrote from his school in Suffolk,
Do not forget to send me the things I am going to ask you for, these are the things. My Butler’s book, my music, 6 worth of pink blotting paper, one B pencil, two HB pencils, and a pile of India rubber, and send them as soon as you can and I will send you the money which I think the things will come to, if it comes to any more please tell me. I will keep account of the postage and everything else . . . I will write again soon. This letter is for Bamba and Catherine, give my love to the girls and Miss Schafer [sic].
I remain yours ever, Edward Duleep Singh.
I have begun my riding. Please send me some stamp paper if you can because a boy is collecting it.12
Sophia became the anchor in Edward’s life, and matured quickly to live up to his expectations. At a time when other young girls’ heads were filled with thoughts of storybooks, sweets and playthings, Sophia fretted about her eleven-year-old brother, who by his own admission, suffered frequent ill health:
Dear Sophy,
. . . I and the chap I sleep with are not going to church because we have got colds my cold never properly went and last Wednesday I got another cold.
The compasses which I exchanged with the stamp album were much better . . . I am sending Bamba the canary book so when it comes tell her that I sent it please.13
Despite his frequent bouts of sickness, Edward excelled at school. His report card showed the little prince achieving top marks for Latin, history and divinity.14 His masters and the other boys liked him immensely, and when the warden was required to sum up the school’s impression of Edward, he described him as: ‘a hard worker and most excellent boy’.15 With his place at Eton a certainty, the future looked bright for the prince.
Even Bamba and Catherine were receiving praise at last. Lord Henniker, who with Arthur Oliphant served as guardian to the children, was proud to pass a glowing progress report to Queen Victoria: ‘They are very much improved in every way and are nice presentable young ladies. Catherine is a very pretty child and the eldest, Bamba, is nice-looking. I have great hopes that the management of them, poor neglected children, will turn out well.’16
While the Duleep Singh children began to find some stability their father, in contrast, was crumbling in Fran
ce. The British spies who remained in his shadows were reporting a dramatic decline in England’s self-styled ‘implacable foe’: ‘Duleep Singh is constantly drunk. This pretender is now, under the influence of his wife, fast becoming a besotted swine . . . He is drinking very hard and his head and face is like that of the defeated prize-fighter from a fall while intoxicated.’17
His campaign to reclaim his throne had brought Duleep nothing but sorrow. After abandoning his wife and family, taking up with Ada and consorting with anti-British elements in Paris, Duleep had tried to pursue an alliance between the Punjab’s Sikhs and the mighty Russian army. Intermediaries from Moscow had convinced him that together, he and the Tsar could pincer the British forces out of north India and trigger a rebellion larger than the Mutiny of 1857. Duleep trusted that his mere presence in Russia would seal the deal. He was wrong.
