by Anand, Anita
Victor had enjoyed a brief entanglement with Lady Anne Coventry after his time at Sandhurst. The relationship had ended amicably after he received his orders to travel to Canada. Her father, the Viscount Deerhurst, who sat on the Conservative benches in the House of Lords, was a well-respected member of the British establishment and of the royal household. Much like the New York banker before him, Viscount Deerhurst was aghast when his daughter took up with Victor again, forbidding her to have anything to do with the prince. Unlike the American heiress, however, Lady Anne refused to give up so meekly. A gentle and refined woman with a halo of curly, strawberry blonde hair, Anne had a quiet strength. Despite her father’s objection, when Victor proposed at the end of 1897, she agreed to marry him.
It was only thanks to the intervention of the Prince of Wales himself, who spoke to the viscount on Victor’s behalf, that the marriage was finally accepted by Anne’s family. The future King Edward VII felt a nostalgic obligation to the Duleep Singhs because of his friendship with the late Maharajah. Even though he had been unable to save his father, the prince seemed determined to do his best for Duleep’s heir.
Sophia was overjoyed when the engagement was formally announced, having been immediately drawn to her brother’s fiancée, who was only two years her senior. Struck by both her independence and her elegance, she found in Anne the role model she had been yearning for. Sophia began to emulate Anne’s style and study her interests. Their friendship was made easier thanks to their mutual love of dogs, horse-riding and clothes.
The morning of 4 April 1898, the day of the wedding, was bright and crisp. By eleven the streets around Eaton Square in Belgravia were filled with onlookers, eager to catch sight of dignitaries arriving in their carriages. Among those who came to St Peter’s church were Victor’s old friends, the swashbuckling Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon, whose son was Victor’s godchild, and Lord Rippon, a former Viceroy of India. There were also representatives from the de Rothschild, Albemarle and Buxton families, some of the most powerful aristocrats in Britain. Sophia and her sisters glowed in their gowns and jewels, while Freddie stood proudly at his brother’s side. The last time that the siblings had been together in such a formal setting was to watch their father being lowered into the ground, six years before.
After the ceremony, festivities carried on well into the night. Champagne flowed, friends toasted the couple, and there was much dancing. The prize amongst the lavish gifts for the bride and groom was a bust of Her Majesty the Queen, sent by Victoria herself to grace the newlyweds’ home. Since the death of Prince Albert, Victoria rarely attended such events herself, but the statue was a valuable personal gesture and seemed to cement the couple’s good fortune.
With the sound of the effusive toasts still ringing in their ears, Victor and Anne set off for their honeymoon. Although he knew a trip to the Punjab was prohibited, Victor thought he might be able to show his wife something of his eastern heritage, even if it was from the distance of British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). However, when they arrived at the port city of Colombo, they were prevented from disembarking. The imperial authorities had decided that having Ranjit Singh’s grandson and heir anywhere near their Indian territories was too dangerous. Even the neighbouring country was too close for comfort. The episode was acutely embarrassing for Victor, who returned to England boiling with silent rage. To calm the waters, Queen Victoria invited the couple to a state ball at Buckingham Palace. Sophia and Freddie were also invited; Catherine and Bamba were not.
Princess Victor, Anne’s title after marriage, soothed her husband’s temper by reminding him what an honour it was to be so favoured by the Queen. She seemed vindicated when, soon after the ball, Anne was asked to Buckingham Palace for a private audience with Her Majesty. It was an invitation she was thrilled to accept, which made what followed even more distressing. The Queen told Anne that she must never have any children with Victor. She offered no explanation but made it clear that these were her wishes. She also strongly advised Anne to take Victor away from London and live abroad in peace.4 There is no record of Victor’s reaction when his wife told him what had passed, but the couple never did have any children. There would never be another Duleep Singh heir to challenge for the throne of the Punjab.
Since her coming out, newspapers all over the world had been diligently recording Sophia’s movements, often in minute and tedious detail. Publications such as Colonies and India, a weekly journal widely read throughout the British Empire, regularly commented on Princess Sophia’s comings and goings. The observations made by the paper were bloodless and factual. Luckily for the more sensational newspapers, the princess had some rather unusual interests that appealed to their readership too.
A prominent article in the Hackney Express and Shoreditch Observer noted in October 1895: ‘Cycling is certainly the fashion of the hour and it is generally annexing the royalty and nobility of Europe. It is patronised by Czar and Kaiser, the King of Greece and the King of Portugal, the King of the Belgians and the Grand Duke Cyril the Crown Prince of Sweden . . . The Maharanee Duleep Singh has just been completing a series of lessons in Battersea Park.’5 The newspaper may have incorrectly promoted Sophia to the title of Maharani, but they were right about one of her growing obsessions. From the moment she took ownership of her shiny new ‘Columbia Model 41 Ladies Safety Bicycle’ from the American Columbia bicycle shop in London’s Baker Street, Sophia was hooked; and without knowing it, she was throwing in her lot with the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement.
The year after Sophia purchased her Columbia bicycle, in America the suffragette, Susan B. Anthony, was so inspired by the growing cycling craze there that she was moved to state that the bicycle had ‘done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel . . . the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.’6
Not everybody was as enthusiastic. Physicians Thomas Lothrop and William Porter argued that the practice of sitting astride a bike would damage women’s reproductive organs,7 and male undergraduates in Cambridge hung an effigy of a woman on a bicycle in the city’s main square. Sophia either did not know or did not care about the controversy. She equipped her own bike with the very latest accessories, including a ‘Vigor and Co. pneumatic anatomical cycle saddle’, which claimed never to get hot, due to its V-shaped ventilated design. It was the saddle favoured by Victorian ladies of distinction since it promised to deliver ‘no vibration, no shock’, and presumably nor would it cause unnecessary excitement.
Soon Sophia became a poster girl for a growing and evangelical cycling movement. She was photographed with her Columbia 41 in Richmond Park, and in Battersea, where the most fashionable ‘wheel people’ tended to congregate. Publications such as The Sketch featured photographs of her posing stiffly but proudly with her bicycle, declaring that she was very fond of the outdoor life ‘and simple amusements which are felt to be the birth right of every happy, healthy girl, be she Princess or peasant’.8 The article went on to describe Sophia as a ‘first-rate cyclist’.9
A publication called Wheelwoman: the Lady Cyclist regaled its readers with reports of ‘famous devotees of the wheel’. Sophia featured in its pages, as did the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was described as ‘a good friend of the wheel’. ‘He says:- “When the spirits are low, when the day becomes dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hopes seem hardly worth having, just mount a bicycle and go for a spin down the road, without thought of anything but the ride you are taking . . . I can only speak words of praise for the bicycle”.’ The magazine added as a postscript: ‘Perhaps one of these days the famous storyteller will give us a modern romance of the road, with a wheel woman for a heroine.’10
Sophia was now as passionate about her bicycle as she had once been about her pony at Elveden. Cycling afforded her the life she cherished: fresh air and exercise, but also a sense of solitude and freedom. Her new craze caused deep suspicion
among the so-called ‘non-wheel people’, whose objections were due in large part to the un-chaperoned liberty that cycling afforded impressionable young women. The thought of hot sweaty females ranging freely across the fields of England was abhorrent to many.
Influenced by sophisticated friends, Sophia also took up smoking in her twenties, a habit both Catherine and Bamba deplored, but one which Sophia embraced with considerable dedication. Predictably, the princess’s taste in tobacco was expensive and exotic. Apart from the regular brands widely available in England, Sophia ordered large batches of speciality cigarettes straight from the manufacturers, Isherwood Brothers in Cairo;11 the yenijee leaf of the Isherwood No. 5s had a resinous quality and gave off a sweet perfume which drove Catherine to distraction whenever she was visiting Faraday. It was not long before she was hopelessly addicted. Sophia seemed forever cloaked in the smell of Turkish tobacco and Verbena-scented talcum powder. In 1900, Sophia placed orders for 800 of Isherwood’s finest cigarettes, spread across a period of eight months. By 1903, her order would swell to 600 cigarettes in one month alone.12
Another of Sophia’s passions was driving Catherine equally mad. Slowly but surely, Sophia was filling her Hampton Court home with dogs of all shapes and sizes. Catherine disliked animals in general and dogs in particular, finding them needy, dirty and selfish. Sophia loved them, with a particular soft spot for the working breeds she had known at Elveden. Now through her sister-in-law, Anne, a successful breeder of exotic hounds, Sophia discovered a whole new world in which dogs were appreciated for their beauty as well as their utility: the newly flourishing dog show.
Late Victorian England was very fond of its competitive exhibitions. The phenomenon at once provided education and filled the increasing leisure time of the upper classes. The Kennel Club had been set up three years before Sophia was born, in 1873.13 Anne had been exhibiting her award-winning Pomeranians at its annual exhibition since she was very young. Immediately competitive, Sophia decided to throw her hat and her hounds into the ring. At first she chose the Borzoi as the breed she would show. These large hunting dogs, which had been bred by the Cossacks to hunt wolves in the deep snows of Czarist Russia, had strong, independent demeanours, and were almost silent by nature. Weighing about a hundred pounds, and around seventy centimetres tall, they were almost the size of the princess herself.
With advice from Anne and Victor and the groundskeepers on their Norfolk estate, Hockwold Hall, Sophia found the best sires for future champions. She went about her ambition with organised zeal and before long was the owner of five magnificent Borzois. Almost immediately they started winning best-in-show prizes at dog fairs up and down the country. Sophia found the experience, and the sense of achievement, exhilarating. The press interest only encouraged her. Reporters loved the idea of an Indian princess challenging the nobility of England in their own competitions and beating them.
The princess and her dogs soon became regular features in illustrated journals such as the Lady’s Realm and The Sketch. ‘Princess Sophia exercises her dogs daily herself, and loves walking on the moors with them in Scotland,’ one article described. ‘She is devoted to any that are ailing, and nurses them most carefully if they get injured. The Princess, who does not care for motoring, is a clever horsewoman . . . Among her pets are also a French poodle and a fox terrier, and she much admires toy Pomeranians.’14 The same article noted that Sophia was also ‘fond of hockey’, a sport which gave the princess another way of venting her competitive urges. The world’s first women’s field hockey clubs were emerging at the turn of the century, and Sophia was a keen and talented sportswoman. She competed regularly – one of the first ladies’ hockey clubs in Great Britain was on her doorstep in East Molesey and the team regularly played fixtures against Ealing and Wimbledon.15 Sophia revelled in her victories, sometimes drawing criticism from her siblings, who thought she ought to show more feminine modesty. Catherine once warned her little sister that she risked losing an invitation to Christmas dinner at Victor’s house if she continued to boast about her sporting prowess.16
The timid girl who used to squirm before the camera was now an unabashed show-off. She would strike absurd poses for newspaper photographers, marrying her two greatest loves: high fashion and dog breeding. One photo feature showed Sophia seated on a bench wearing a long dress with elaborate collar and large flat velvet hat, dwarfed by her award-winning Borzois.17 In The Sketch she posed with horse and hounds together, demurely casting her eyes to the ground while holding the reigns of a gleaming chestnut thoroughbred in one hand, and the leashes of four enormous dogs in the other.18 Catherine found the whole thing preposterous, and teased her little sister mercilessly.
In time, Sophia switched her breeding efforts from Borzois to Pomeranians. The tiny fluffy dogs, with their fox-like faces and feathery manes, had been a favourite of aristocracy and royalty since the eighteenth century, when they were favoured by George III’s wife Queen Charlotte. Queen Victoria had been the owner of a particularly small example, which had triggered a surge in the dog’s fashionability and a breeding trend which saw the size of Pomeranians decrease by fifty per cent in the monarch’s lifetime. Some dogs achieved celebrity status in their own right. Former prime minister William Gladstone was often photographed with a beloved black pom called ‘Petz’, which travelled with him everywhere, even on state visits. The dog’s death in 1898 made national headlines. Gladstone died a few weeks later.
In her efforts to rear the perfect Pomeranian, Sophia attracted plaudits and awards, and was soon regarded as being among the best breeders in the country. Of all her spoilt and pampered dogs, a spirited black pup named Joseph captured her heart the most, and every prize in the national Pomeranian categories. Sophia documented Joe’s lineage, and treated her little dog like a prince, despite the derogatory names of his ancestors: in handwritten family trees, which she kept locked away among her most treasured papers, the princess noted lovingly that Joseph’s ‘grandparents’ were called ‘Liebling and Lulu’ on his mother’s side, and ‘Nigger II and Topsy’ on the other.19
Sophia and Joe featured in a popular book of the times, Dog Shows and Doggy People, which included photographs of the pair accompanied by page after page of genuflecting prose:
I am pleased to be able to give an excellent portrait of Princess Sophie, who will be known to many of my readers as an occasional exhibitor at some of our leading shows, and her charming little Black Pomeranian Joseph . . . the writer has been assured that their mistress has always been extremely fond of dogs, and likes them not only from a show point of view, but also for themselves. The above sentiments warrant the hope that we may see more exhibits forthcoming from Her Highness’s kennel, and that the Princess may long be numbered amongst the ever increasing ranks of Doggy People, who are honoured by her presence and personal patronage.20
In an attempt to encourage their sister into more refined pursuits, Catherine and Bamba badgered Sophia to start taking piano lessons again. Their father had enjoyed music – Duleep had once composed an opera for one of his mistresses – and Sophia was said to have inherited many of the Maharajah’s musical talents. One of her most expensive purchases at Faraday House was a Steinway grand piano which cost £136, almost a quarter of the princess’s entire annual budget.21 Sophia also vigorously pursued another of her father’s great passions – that of photography. Space and independence at Faraday House allowed her to practise her art, and she became a regular client of the Eastman Kodak Company which had just opened its doors at 115 Oxford Street. The huge number of surviving bills and receipts for equipment, film and development show the extent of her commitment.22
As she embraced her twenties, Sophia revelled in her newfound pursuits and glamorous, if not slightly unconventional, lifestyle. Catherine too was happy, spending all her time with Lina in Germany. For the eldest sister Bamba, however, life was becoming unbearable.
For as long as she could remember, Bamba had loathed the country which she believed had rob
bed her of everything. She blamed the British for betraying her father and the press for vilifying her brother, Victor. She had never felt as though she belonged in England, nor did she have any desire to be accepted. Unlike Sophia, Bamba did not enjoy the company of the British aristocracy, and her direct and challenging manner provoked fierce reactions from those she met.
She also decided that Britain was a country fit only for crushing her dreams. Despite failing at university, Bamba declared that she wanted to become a doctor. It was a surprising ambition and also a very difficult one to achieve. In Victorian England the opportunities for women to study and succeed in medicine were almost non-existent, despite the trailblazing work of individuals such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman in Britain to qualify as a physician and surgeon. Shunned by medical schools and teaching hospitals, Garrett Anderson had been forced to enter the profession through the back door by getting her medical licence in 1865 from the Society of Apothecaries. After she did so, the society changed its rules, and no other woman was admitted. Garrett Anderson only gained membership of the British Medical Association in 1873, and remained its sole woman member for almost twenty years. Disheartened at the number of doors slammed in her own face, Bamba planned to make her way across the Atlantic in order to investigate medical colleges there. America had granted a medical degree to its first woman in 1849. Elizabeth Blackwell then went on to found a medical college in New York with her younger sister who also qualified as a doctor. Similar schools were opening up in other cities, despite voluble opposition from the male establishment. Bamba would have been aware of Elizabeth Blackwell’s memoir Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, which had been published just a couple of years before. It had proved to be inspirational to many would-be women medics around the world.
