Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  As long as Bosie did not catch them, the children had free run of the house and gardens. Michael would be the only one courageous enough to sneak into Sophia’s rooms, to steal cigarettes from the carved teak box on her desk. No matter how hard Bosie tried to stop him, Michael found a way in: ‘He’s been in there again, that little pickle. He’s smoked four of them today. Just wait till I get my hands on him.’31 The other children would watch her wander around the garden waving her walking stick as if she was going to give Michael a good hiding: ‘She never did of course,’32 remembered Shirley laughing.

  Despite the war, large Army & Navy Stores vans still arrived in the village from London with deliveries for the princesses. They brought food, some treats for the baby, and numerous cartons of cigarettes. One afternoon, Catherine made a rare trip across the Hammersley Road, to call upon her sister and see what had arrived in the consignment. The baby was just beginning to crawl, and was entertaining Sophia with her clumsy efforts. All of a sudden, she picked up something from the ground and put it in her mouth. Sophia and Bosie both shouted ‘Catherine no!’ at the same time, causing Princess Catherine to jump with fright.33 ‘There is only one Catherine in this household and it is I,’ the princess muttered as she set down her tea cup and swept out of the house in disgust. Bosie looked at Sophia in panic. ‘Don’t worry,’ replied the princess, calmly watching her sister leave, ‘we shall call the baby Drovna. Drovna means daughter. That shall be her name from now on.’34 The child grew up knowing only that name and it was not until years later that she found out that ‘Drovna’ was a little piece of Sophia’s own eccentric middle name.

  The children meant everything to Sophia and she would spoil them at any opportunity. When, after a year of living at Rathenrea, Shirley’s birthday came round, the ten-year-old asked shyly whether she might have a friend round for tea. The princess insisted that the whole class be invited, and spent the entire sugar ration for a fortnight on cakes and treats for them all. She bought John a pet goat and asked a local farmer to teach him to milk it. When it rained, Sophia sent Lane in ‘the motor’ to pick up the children, though petrol was in short supply. The arrival of such a grand automobile complete with chauffeur would cause pandemonium at the little village school. Regarding the children as her own, Sophia guarded them like a lioness.

  ‘One time in 1942 I think, we were late back . . . The princess was waiting for us as usual, and demanded to know where we had been,’35 recalled Shirley. ‘We told her a nice old man had stopped us on the way home and wanted to know all about us . . . She was furious. She told us never to talk to strangers again, and got straight on the phone to the local policeman. She must have given him quite the earful because he was off on his bike immediately, huffing and puffing up and down the lane to investigate. It turned out the old man was [the poet] Walter de la Mare, who was staying with his daughter in Penn. He was working on a poem about evacuees. We felt terrible for the trouble we caused for him. Poor man got the fright of his life!’36

  Thousands of bombs had been dropped on Britain since the start of the war, but despite the Blitz and the horrors that came with it, Sophia had never been more content in her life. Even when in 1942, the Luftwaffe changed tactics and adopted an official bombing policy of targeting civilians, she remained unperturbed. Sophia’s air-raid shelter stood at the bottom of her garden, and whenever the siren sounded, she calmly shepherded the children, Bosie, her daughter Drovna and the dogs into the underground Anderson shelter, only to return to the house and sit out the raid smoking angrily out of the window. She was convinced no German bomb would kill her or Catherine. As it turned out, she was right.

  On the evening of Sunday 8 November, 1942, Sophia and Catherine had been to watch an amateur dramatic performance in the local village. ‘We walked ¾ mile each way,’37 she would later tell friends. Afterwards they dined at Coalhatch House and played a few hands of whist. Sophia took her leave some time after midnight and Catherine also retired. During the night, the elder princess felt uncomfortable and tried to get up, but the moment she swung her feet to the floor she suffered a heart attack and collapsed. When Princess Catherine failed to ring the bell for her noontime ‘breakfast’, servants knocked on the door of Rathenrea in alarm. Catherine was always punctilious about her mealtimes.

  Sophia ran across the road in panic, darted up the stairs of Coalhatch House to her sister’s room and banged on the door. Getting no answer, she ordered the servants to break it down. What she saw brought her to her knees in anguish: ‘I found her lying on the floor on her back. It evidently happened when she was getting up. The doctor said it was quite painless and instantaneous and nothing could have been done. A lot of blood on the heart. You can imagine just what an awful shock it was to me.’38

  Sophia raved in her grief and had to be half-carried, half-dragged from the room. In the days that followed friends begged her to let them help her, but Sophia just wanted to be left alone. As she wrote later: ‘It completely stunned and stupefied me – and I couldn’t shake myself up to ordinary things again.’39 She did not even know if her sister in India would read her telegram in time for the funeral. She knew she would be the only member of the Duleep Singh family present to mourn Princess Catherine’s passing.

  After the funeral, Sophia ordered Catherine’s room to be locked and never opened again, but it did little to ease her pain.40 She could still see Coalhatch House from her windows, and its emptiness proved too horrifying. In an attempt to feel close to her sister still, she renamed Coalhatch ‘Hilden Hall’ (Catherine’s middle name had been Hilda). She became convinced that her dead sister’s troubled spirit was haunting the house across the road and would beg the children to go in first and tell her if they could ‘feel’ anything. Despite Bosie’s best efforts, it all became too much for Sophia. Weeks after the funeral, she fled Rathenrea and all those who loved her.

  Sophia hid herself away at the country home of one of her Hampton Court friends, Miss Phipps, a fellow grace-and-favour resident. At her isolated house in the New Forest, it took Sophia almost a month to regain enough composure to return to Buckinghamshire.41 When she did, her thoughts were filled with her own mortality and she started to prepare for her own death. The Sarbutt children were relocated in 1943, moving back with their mother and other relatives, leaving only four-year old Drovna to distract Sophia from the paralysing depression she felt closing in on her.

  The little girl was growing up fast, and Sophia threw herself into teaching her everything she knew. As Drovna would later recall: ‘One of my earliest memories is of sitting at a table with a ripe peach . . . from our orchard I suppose because rationing made things like that hard to get . . . I could smell it and wanted to eat it so much, but she would make me eat it with a knife and fork. I needed to learn manners you see.’42 Sophia ordered the finest clothes from the boutiques that had escaped the Blitz and insisted Drovna wear hats and gloves whenever she accompanied her in public. She even presented her with the doll her own godmother had given her. ‘Her name is Sophie. She was given to me by a queen,’43 she told the little girl.

  With the advent of peace in 1945, Sophia, like many others, returned to see what the war had left of London. Much of the cityscape was changed beyond recognition, but Hampton Court had been left unscathed. At the start of the war, a few incendiary bombs had been dropped on the palace, but fire wardens managed to kick them away before the old timbers caught fire. Slowly moving back into her old rooms, Sophia had the chance to show Drovna something of her old life. Every day they would venture into the grounds with the dogs, and the princess would make Drovna repeat the names of flowers until she had committed them to memory.44 She showed her all the Sikh artefacts that still remained in her possession, testing her on what they were and who they had belonged to. Sometimes the flood of information was too much for such a small child. Sophia had a huge box under the stairs, beautifully carved, heavy and old, which she called ‘The Elephant Box’. The six-year-old came to believe a real elephant li
ved inside: ‘I thought, poor elephant, no one feeds it. No one ever feeds it. So I used to save things from my tea and leave bits on top so the elephant could have something.’ In fact the box contained an exquisite four-foot-tall statue of Maharajah Ranjit Singh riding upon an elephant. Made of the finest solid silver, it depicted Sophia’s grandfather in all his splendour, with an attendant at his rear shielding him from the sun with a silk umbrella. Intricate figures carved on the heavy plinth formed the base of the statue: on one side, hunters stalked a deer; on the other, men found themselves stalked by a lioness. The side panels were filled with depictions of Indian and European soldiers, presided over by the one-eyed King. It was a priceless artefact.45 Although Bosie was not amused when she found the piles of mouldering food on the box, Sophia howled with laughter.46

  The princess was delighted by everything her little protégé did and said. Apart from the regular gifts, Drovna would be the only child she would attempt to leave her most precious legacy to: ‘We’d be walking, and she’d be telling me about the world and elections and how important they were. And then she would kneel down in front of me, looking me right in the eye and say “I want a solemn promise from you” even though I don’t think I knew what a solemn promise was at that stage. She would say “You are never, ever not to vote. You must promise me. When you are allowed to vote you are never, ever to fail to do so. You don’t realise how far we’ve come. Promise me.” ’47 For the next three years, Sophia made Drovna promise again and again. The ferocity of Sophia’s insistence was overwhelming.

  Princess Sophia Duleep Singh lived to see India gain its independence. She also saw Partition rip Punjab in two. Great cities she had known and loved were split between irreconcilable new neighbours. Lahore went to Pakistan, Amritsar went to India and a river of blood ran between them, as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs turned on one another with murderous ferocity. Sophia lived to see the British leave, and mourned what had been left in their wake.

  After the war, Bamba was able to travel to England once again, and the two sisters divided their time between Penn and Hampton Court. It was clear that Sophia was not the woman she once was. She moved slowly, and had a constant pain in her eye, which could confine her to her bed for days in agony. Bosie later told her daughter that the princess had been diagnosed with a tumour but had not wanted to worry anyone with the news. The doctors said they could save her life and relieve her pain if they could but remove her eye. Having grown up under canvases depicting her disfigured grandfather, Sophia refused surgery, insisting that fresh air and exercise was all she needed to recover.

  Bosie believed Sophia was just too tired to fight any more, and too vain to allow them to destroy her face. Although physically weak, and in almost constant agony, Sophia retained much of her humour right up until the end. On 28 February 1947 she wrote to a former servant, Gwendolyne Edwards, who had been a much-cherished maid at both Rathenrea and Hampton Court. After almost seven years of service, Gwenda had fallen in love with a Spaniard; the pair married, and barely a year later she was expecting twins. Even though she had moved back to her native Wales, Gwenda remained so fond of her former mistress that she wrote regularly and sent her a ham and chocolates for Christmas. It had taken two months for Sophia to gather the strength to thank her in a four-page letter, filled with warmth and little snippets of local news. Penn felt colder than usual, Sophia confessed, and she did not get out as much as she would have liked. Realising that she had painted a sad picture, Sophia attempted to lighten the mood, telling Gwenda she often sat by the fire, holding her aching legs over the flames, ‘until they scorched!’ Of Gwenda’s newborn twin daughters, she joked: ‘Babies of that age are all exactly alike, perfectly hideous! Ah well, it’s a good thing their mothers never think so!!’ Her carefree, teasing tone did not betray her infirmity; however the slope of her trembling handwriting did.48

  On 22 August 1948, Sophia died peacefully in her sleep at Rathenrea. She was seventy-one years old. Bosie was with her at the end.

  * The year was one filled with loss for Sophia. Her mentor Lala Lajpat Rai died on 17 November 1928. While leading a silent, non-violent march against the raj he was badly beaten in a lathi charge. He later died of his internal injuries.

  Epilogue

  Although she had been a church-going Christian all her life, at the end, Sophia’s wish was to have her body cremated like a Sikh, and for her ashes to be scattered in India. Perhaps the country of her ancestors had at last come to feel like ‘home’. Maybe she was just honouring her grandmother Jindan, who had made the same journey after death. Perhaps she did not want to leave a cold tombstone for Drovna and others to weep over; Sophia had cried beside too many graves in her youth and would not have wished the same on anyone she loved.

  Though she did not explain her decision, it was deliberate and well considered. Protracted illness had given her much time to think about death and her funeral. She asked that, ‘A full band shall play Wagner’s Funeral March from Götterdammerung’ as her body was committed to the flames. Even though it had become unpopular to play Wagner after the Second World War, Sophia did not care. She had listened to the composer frequently with Catherine on creaky gramophone records in Penn.

  As the only living Duleep Singh left in the world, it was up to Bamba to fulfil her sister’s final wishes. In 1949, at almost eighty years of age, she collected Sophia’s ashes and those of their late sister Catherine. An urn of her remains had been lovingly kept at Hilden Hall by Sophia who found comfort in having them near.

  Bamba chose to say farewell to Sophia first. Though frail and unwell, she undertook an arduous land and sea route to the city of Lahore, which now stood in the new country of Pakistan. It would have been much easier to take one of the numerous flights that now connected the West to the East. However, as she explained to a cousin, ‘I came by land as I brought my darling sisters ashes with me. She did not like flights.’1 To this day, nobody knows where Bamba scattered Sophia’s ashes, or what thoughts passed through her grieving mind.

  Weeks later, Bamba made her way back to Europe, stopping briefly in Germany. She arrived one night without warning at the home of one of Lina’s relatives, and pressed an urn into his hands. She asked that Catherine’s remains be buried next to Lina’s. She wanted the women to be together again.2

  For a while, Bamba took up residence at Hilden Hall, struggling to come to terms with her loss. As always, her emotions found their expression in outbursts of white-hot rage. She accused staff at both Hilden Hall and Rathenrea of stealing from Sophia while she lay dying. One by one they folded up their maroon uniforms and left. Bamba’s severest wrath was reserved for Bosie and nine-year-old Drovna. Soon after the funeral, the princess and the housekeeper fought so viciously that Bosie took her family and left Rathenrea in the middle of the night, never to return.3 Sophia must have expected such difficulties after she was gone, and the memory of Bamba’s conduct after Irene’s death must have haunted her; yet she still had enough love for her sister to name Bamba as executor of her estate. She was certain Bamba would not betray her trust, and she was right.

  Some of the bequests were easy to honour. Beneficiaries included three girls’ schools, one Sikh, one Muslim and one Hindu. Though India was riven with division, Sophia was determined that her desire to educate girls would be equal among all the people of the Punjab, irrespective of recent Partition bloodshed. Sophia also left £500 to Battersea Dogs’ Home and £450 to the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, proving that her love for animals matched, and sometimes surpassed, her love for people. A trust fund was also set up for the upkeep of all the family graves in England.

  To the friends she cherished most, Miss Phipps in the New Forest and Mrs Mackenzie in Inverness, she opened up her jewellery box. They were invited to choose an item each from among her finest heirlooms. There were pecuniary bequests to cherished individuals from Sophia’s past, including ‘Sardar Pritam Singh son of the late Sardar Gurdit Singh Sandhawalia of Rajah Sansi Punjab. If h
e shall be living at my death . . .’ He was the same young boy she once could have adopted as her own.

  Artworks were left to Indian galleries; her Jacobean pieces, gifts from Freddie, were sent to the same museum in Inverness which had taken his collection, and sums of money were distributed to former servants. Apart from Bamba, who inherited Rathenrea and Hilden Hall, their contents and any remaining items in her jewellery case, the greatest generosity and most personal bequests were left to Bosie, Lane and Drovna. Tellingly, Sophia had left separate amounts to both Bosie and her husband, perhaps believing that it was the only way to ensure financial autonomy for her housekeeper if something went wrong in their marriage. (It never did.) Bosie was left additional items which the princess thought might amuse the woman who had once locked herself in the bathroom because she wanted to see an elephant: ‘To Mrs Ivy Janet Lane, my Encyclopaedia, I See All, and my books Famous Pictures and . . . Wonders of the Past.’

  Leaving Drovna would always be the most difficult reality to confront. Sophia left the child the entire contents of her Post Office savings account and asked that it be passed to her at the age of twenty-one. However if her parents decided that they needed the money for her during childhood, she gave a caveat to the bequest: ‘I authorise my Trustees to apply the whole or any part of the said money to her education, advancement and benefit . . .’ Even though she would not be there to see Drovna grow up, she wanted the passage of time to go easy on her goddaughter.