Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  Although her desire to qualify was real, Bamba had one eye on an ambition that burnt more deeply still. She wanted to get to India and live out her days in the Sikh kingdom of her ancestors. Knowing how the British had stopped her brother Victor from travelling there, and aware of the government’s surveillance and monitoring of her family’s movements, Bamba felt trapped. Never known for her good manners, she became even ruder to the Hampton Court neighbours and less tolerant of the servants. Only her sisters truly understood the depth of her torment. They realised that they had to get Bamba out of England before she lost her mind.

  With Catherine and Sophia’s help, Bamba looked for a more circuitous passage to India. The sisters announced that Princess Bamba was looking at medical colleges in America but first planned to take a holiday to prepare for the hard years of study which lay ahead of her. On 30 January 1900, Bamba booked tickets on the König Albert, a majestic new German ocean liner bound for China via Ceylon. The plan was for Bamba to travel as far as Yokohama in Japan, all the while pushing to see how close she might get to India without provoking the ire of the British government.

  Sophia agreed to accompany her sister on the liner as far as Japan, and prepared for the long months ahead. Freddie could not believe that his little sister was happy to leave England for such a length of time. To him, everything abroad was ‘horrid’ and ‘unnecessary’. To Sophia, Bamba’s needs were obvious and overwhelming; only the idea of being parted from her pets made her hesitate, especially her beloved Joe. She did not wish to leave her animals in the care of indifferent servants, but neither did the princess wish to let her sister down. From Germany, Catherine realised Sophia’s torn loyalties and offered to come back to look after the menagerie at Faraday House. Even though Catherine made great play of her antipathy, Sophia knew that nobody would take better care of her dogs and birds, for her sake. She also promised to write to Sophia regularly and update her on Joseph’s health and happiness, even though she and the dog had taken an immediate and intense dislike to one another.

  From the moment they embarked on the voyage, the Duleep Singh princesses attracted attention from fellow passengers and the press. Bamba hated the spotlight almost as much as Sophia enjoyed it, and ferociously ignored all approaches. She treated crew and staff with either brusqueness or outrageous bad manners. The sisters tensed as the König Albert approached the coast of Colombo. Would they be turned back just like Victor? In the event they were given permission to disembark and they spent shore leave shopping and sampling local cuisine, before rejoining the ship with the other passengers. The India Office sent favourable communications to London: the Princesses Sophia and Bamba were keeping a dutifully low profile and the authorities had no complaints to make against them. Bamba’s far-off dreams of settling in the old Sikh kingdom no longer seemed impossible.

  At Faraday House, Catherine monitored her sisters’ adventures with relish. Sophia, ever the diligent correspondent, wrote to her at least once, often twice, a week. Catherine reciprocated, forwarding post and gossip, and paying bills on Sophia’s behalf. On 2 February 1900 she wrote: ‘Dear Saff, I am sending those of your innumerable letters which I think will amuse you . . . There was some Pug Dog Chat rubbish.’23 Knowing that Sophia would be pining for news of Joseph, Catherine jokingly refused even to use his name, referring to the beloved pet only as ‘the piece of goods’24 or ‘that little horror’.25 ‘Your most precious piece of goods is perfectly well,’ she announced in one letter, ‘but do not flatter yourself that he misses you. On the contrary I should say he is very happy to be able to stay in the kitchen in peace, I have heard him bark once for the front door bell, which we will suppose was for you, but only once! There is a nice piece of faithlessness and indifference for yourself!!’26

  No piece of Joe news was too trivial to pass on: ‘I just picked him up a few steps towards the hall, which caused no end of growling; having teased him sufficiently I let him go . . . I tell you all this Joe-ish nonsense knowing it interests you more than anything else.’27

  These weekly letters between the sisters were heavily laced with mutual affection. Catherine frequently addressed Sophia as ‘Dear little Saff’. On occasion Catherine would refer to her as ‘Zwaff’, and herself as ‘Caswen’ (the private joke being that this was how Joe the dog would say their names if he could speak). ‘I am glad you seem to be enjoying yourself all right – all the dogs are all well – Joe quite happy! One morning he set off howling in the kitchen . . . I don’t think the howl was for you; whenever I say, do you want Zwaff, he pretends he wants to go to the door.’ 28

  Freddie missed Sophia terribly and was dismayed to learn that his youngest sister had enjoyed the voyage to the Far East so much that she had decided to extend her time away. Sophia informed her brother that she was now en route with Bamba to the other side of the world. From Japan they sailed for America on the steamship Nippon Maru, arriving on the east coast in July 1900. The trip would keep Sophia from her brother and England for a further two months. Freddie complained bitterly in letters to his sister, imploring her to come back.

  Travelling in such close quarters and spending all their time together fostered a new intimacy and understanding between Bamba and Sophia. The women’s friendship baffled the rest of the world. To the outsider’s eye, they could not have been more different: Sophia was graceful, languid and friendly; Bamba was aloof and irascible. The international press were fascinated by the odd couple, as an article in the Boston Daily Globe revealed. ‘Princesses Bamba and Sophia Duleep Singh recently arrived in San Francisco from Tokyo,’ the paper announced on 17 July. The reporter wanted to know whether the ladies liked America. He was surprised by the answers Sophia gave:

  ‘We have met many Americans and think the women charming,’ said Princess Sophia.

  ‘And American men – you like them?’

  ‘Not so much. They work too hard and are not the women’s equal,’ said the representative of the most aristocratic caste system in the world.29

  The interview was not going well. The Globe reporter persisted.

  ‘With you, are the women also superior?’ But the Princess Dhuleep Singh declined to answer further than to say that the ‘Indian colleges are open to women’.

  ‘We in San Francisco have been trying to do something for your starving people in India.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the princesses, but without one spark of interest, and playing indifferently with the diamonds on their slender fingers – ransom of innumerable lives in that death-stricken country.30

  Bamba had barely spoken to the journalist and now Sophia turned her back on him too. As the interview ground to a painful halt, the Globe reporter was left to make his final observations alone:

  They visited in San Francisco the medical department of the University of California and were much pleased with what they saw. They are travelling a la Americaine – almost – with a French maid only, these princesses of the oldest and most aristocratic race known today. With a marked English accent and a decided Spanish appearance it would be indeed difficult to determine their nationality without the Hindoo name. But those slim fine brown, tapered fingers are only ‘made in India’ – and beautiful they are!31

  After touring many of the colleges, Bamba applied for a place on a course at Northwestern University in Chicago, and was accepted. Sophia fretted about her sister being alone in America, without a loved one to protect her or translate her idiosyncratic ways to an often hostile world. Knowing that she would be lonely in her inevitable isolation, she convinced Bamba that when she returned to start the course in a month she should do so with a couple of Sophia’s dogs for company.

  Bamba’s relationship with the American press, which had started badly, got progressively worse. Reporters waiting to catch sight of the royal visitor were given short shrift:

  A dark, timid-looking woman of small stature, who was the object of much attention on the pier, was the Princess Bamba Duleep Singh. She is from the Punjab India. She had a
large assortment of baggage, besides two fine dogs, one a Great Dane named Leon, the other a beautiful cream colour Russian wolfhound, the name of which she refused to divulge. When asked by the newspaper men to say something for publication, the princess turned her back on them and refused to say a word. When one of them asked her if she would not tell them the names of her dogs, she turned around and said: ‘Leave the dogs alone, and don’t you put anything in the paper about them either.’32

  Newspapers from Maine to Oregon reported the princess’s career aspirations with a degree of opprobrium. Although several universities were admitting women medical students, many Americans found the practice distasteful, believing like their British counterparts that women doctors were an affront to the natural order. Yet despite their disapproval, readers were hungry for news of their royal ‘freshman’ and papers up and down the country obliged:

  The Women’s Medical College has a new student – the Princess Bamba Duleep Singh. If fate had not been against her, Princess Singh might have perhaps today been a queen of India instead of a humble medical student. Her grandfather was the last ruler of that Empire, the kingly Runjeet Singh, from whom Great Britain wrenched the crown, and also the famous Koh-I-Noor diamond. The princess has taken it into her head to become a doctor. Her home is in England, but it is said she harbors no special love for the country that took away her hereditary possessions . . . of course she is dark and has wavy black hair, and eyes that flash blackness from under long, silky lashes. If she was a queen of India she might with a wave of her slender little hand, order a head chopped off as easily as she now turns a page in her anatomy books. But those days are over in India, so the princess is going to be a life-saver, instead of a life-taker.33

  Bamba’s discretion was simply fuelling the interest: ‘The young women students were nearly thrown in to hysterics by the coming of the dainty Indian princess, who made her first appearance at the college in a carriage.’ Other papers actively invaded Bamba’s privacy, stationing reporters on the street outside her home and in her lecture halls. Without Sophia to shield her, Bamba was entirely exposed: ‘As soon as she arrived the princess took apartments in the residence of Miss Palmer at 404 West Adams Street and presented herself for matriculation . . . The princess keeps generally in the seclusion of her rooms, her maid serving her meals there. On Sunday morning she went out for a walk with two dogs which crossed the ocean with her . . . On the street she wore a short blue skirt with an Eton jacket of fur and a brown felt hat. Her dress is European, her speech a quaint, lisping English. The maid she brought from England is as reserved in speech as she is.’34

  Meanwhile, Sophia quickly resumed her place on the British social scene, once again proving to be very popular. The press there were altogether less intrusive than the Americans, keeping her pleasingly in the public eye without violating her privacy. ‘Christmas sees the Riviera at the beginning of what promises to be a really good season,’ reported the Daily Mail. ‘There has this year been no scare of epidemics, no anti-English feeling, to keep away those who can leave the cold and murky north to enjoy brilliantly sunny days. The tables at Monte Carlo are crowded daily, and so is the Opera House . . . Lord De la Warr and Baron Arthur de Rothschild are both staying at Monte Carlo, and the Princess Duleep Singh drove over to Nice the other morning from Beaulieu to do some shopping.’35

  Everything Sophia did seemed to endear her to them, and the British press was now even claiming her as one of their own. ‘Notwithstanding her great Oriental name, which marks her to those cognisant of Indian history as a descendant of the famous founder of the last Sikh Empire, the princess is to all intents and purposes, a thoroughly English girl’.36

  Sophia might have continued to live her life in a comfortable bubble were it not for the news of Bamba’s continuing difficulties. Not only was Bamba battling to maintain her privacy while at the same time keeping up with the punishing workload at her medical school, but the locals were also being unkind to her. As usual the press were never slow to report on Bamba’s tribulations: ‘On her daily trips between her home on West Adams Street and the University, the daughter of the Maharaja of Lahore has been pelted with lumps of snow. “Such a thing would not be permitted in England,”37 she said. “I shall leave Chicago . . . I have never encountered such rude people in all my life.”’38 Bamba was not the only person who was finding the winter difficult.

  After spending Christmas at her beloved Osborne House on the Isle of White, Queen Victoria, now eighty-one, felt weak and unwell. She was already frail, with eyesight diminished by cataracts and mobility curtailed by severe rheumatism. The demands of the festive season took a further toll on her health. For some time the Queen had become almost entirely dependent on one of her Indian servants, Mohammed Abdul Karim, who she fondly referred to as her Munshi, the Hindi word for secretary.

  Karim had served Victoria faithfully for the last fifteen years of her life, feeding her unquenchable desire to learn more about India. He cooked curries for her, taught her to write in Urdu and Hindi and filled her head with exciting tales of his childhood. Victoria’s devotion to the Munshi was absolute and she ignored warnings from her close circle to distance herself from what they regarded as another ‘malign influence’. To many at the Palace, the relationship echoed a past and ultimately doomed obsession. When she had been besotted with the Maharajah, however, advisers had cloaked many of their misgivings. Now that a mere native servant enthralled her, there was no attempt to hide hostility. Despite widespread disapproval Victoria kept Karim close at all times. She signed letters to him with ‘your loving mother’, and ‘your closest friend’, and even placed kisses below her signature. The Munshi watched helplessly as the Queen’s condition deteriorated through Christmas into the New Year. On 22 January 1901, at half past six in the evening, Victoria died in her bed at Osborne House. Her son and successor, King Edward VII, and eldest grandson, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, were at her bedside.

  The nation was plunged into a period of intense mourning. People went about their business dressed in sober black and banners of black and purple were draped on shop fronts and from the gates of houses. It was as if a dark bruise had settled over the country. Victoria’s reign had lasted for almost sixty-four years, during which Imperial Britain had swallowed as much as a fifth of the world’s land mass. The new king gave the nation three months to grieve, after which time the official period of mourning ended and Britain and the Empire awoke to a new, modern, Edwardian era.

  If the loss of her godmother affected Sophia in any way, she did not show it outwardly, throwing herself into the unending tidal movements of high society. In the early 1900s she spent autumns on the French Riviera, Hogmanay in Scotland and divided the rest of the year between London and the country, staying either with Victor at his Norfolk home, or nearby with Freddie at his impressive new country estate at Old Buckenham Hall in Suffolk. Both brothers had chosen to live within a few miles of Elveden. Their father’s sprawling old home had been sold to the Guinness family soon after his death and though Freddie maintained a good relationship with the new masters of Elveden, Victor remained aloof.

  Sophia’s country breaks allowed her to draw breath before the next exhausting round of social engagements. Prepared to go wherever the most important parties were being held, she dedicated herself to the pursuit of her own pleasure. Her father’s dear friend and frequent visitor to her childhood home, Bertie, was on the throne and she was the belle of most balls she attended. Life was good and beyond that Sophia had little connection with what was happening around her, even though so much of the world was changing.

  The Empire bubbled with talk of insurrection, and calls for Home Rule from the newly formed Indian National Congress were getting louder and more insistent, echoing the situation in Ireland. A second Boer War had been raging since 1899 and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was dragging all of Europe to the brink of conflict by sending 50,000 troops to the frontiers of Bulgaria. Although she seemed to close her eye
s to all of it, not everyone in her social circle was as immune to politics as Sophia. Talk at aristocratic tables would often stray to trade unions, which were becoming more organised and influential, and Keir Hardie’s newly formed Labour Party was gaining support among the workers in the industrial towns and cities.

  One of the most unsettling changes for the conservative post-Victorians came from an organised movement of middle-class women which was growing in rank and file. One of the most influential, Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), with its central tenet of ‘Votes for Women’, was gaining traction. The patricians in the higher social orders had many reasons to grumble. Even though some of the women she mixed with were showing an interest in Fawcett’s manifesto, Princess Sophia had little time for such matters. It was only when Bamba suffered direct discrimination that Sophia began to take notice.

  During the summer of 1902, the authorities of Chicago’s Northwestern University, quite without warning, changed their minds about the propriety of training women to become doctors. One university trustee, Paul Raymond, was particularly scathing when called upon to explain the unexpected cancellation of Bamba’s course: ‘Women cannot grasp chemical laboratory work or the intricacies of surgery. Fifteen years ago the graduating class of men and women signed a memorial saying that coeducation was a failure. Then we conducted the college exclusively for women, and it has been worse than a failure.’39 Having terminated the course mid-term, Raymond and his board left all the women medical students stranded, and crushed Bamba’s hopes of ever becoming a doctor. Sophia waited anxiously for her sister to return to England, knowing how hurt and angry she must be feeling.