Sher Ali’s response, dated November 19, stopped short of an apology but agreed to the demand for a permanent British mission. However, the letter took ten days to reach Lytton. By then, it was too late. At 3 a.m. on November 21, 1878, three columns, totalling 35,000 men advanced on Afghanistan. One column moved swiftly up the Kurram Valley before meeting with stiff resistance at the Peiwar Kotal Pass. Another marched through the Bolan Pass towards Kandahar.
The largest of the columns was commanded by Lieutenant General Sam Browne, a veteran of the Mutiny who had lost an arm and been awarded the Victoria Cross. He marched from Peshawar directly up the Khyber Pass. Barring the way was the fort at Ali Masjid which, for centuries, had guarded the pass against invaders.
Surrounded by cliffs and built at the top of a 3000-foot-high mountain, Ali Masjid, literally, the ‘Fort of Ali’, guards the pass where it narrows to a point just a few yeards wide. A well-positioned group of snipers could hold up an army for days, if not weeks. Cavagnari had paid the Afridi tribesmen who ran a protection racket through the pass a toll of 87,000 rupees to let the invasion force through once Ali Masjid was taken, but key intelligence was lacking on the strength of the Afghan force stationed at the fort and the secret passages and trails that led to it.
It was at his crucial juncture that Jacob later claimed to have rendered his ‘greatest service to the Government of Lord Lytton’, by relaying information from his contacts about enemy numbers and their position in the Khyber Pass and at Ali Masjid. Based on this intelligence, the Viceroy ‘ordered Sir Sam Browne to make the assault on Ali Masjid which resulted so successfully’.19
The battle began on November 21 with Browne’s force of 1900 men exchanging fire with Afghan patrols. The British put their field guns in position and bombarded the Afghan tribesmen. According to Jacob’s informant, 3400 Afghans with 24 cannons held the positions in and around the fort and along the ridges on either side.
At around 2.30 in the afternoon, Browne began his outflanking move, sending his two infantry brigades forward on either side of the pass to attack the Afghans. The fighting continued until dusk with neither side making much progress. When Browne ordered the attack to resume the next morning, he found the Afghans had withdrawn and the fort had been destroyed by the previous day’s almost-constant artillery bombardment.
How much Jacob’s ‘intelligence’ helped defeat the Afghan forces at Ali Masjid is open to question. The British were far better equipped than during the First Afghan War in 1838. They communicated by telegraph and heliograph, instead of couriers. They wore khaki uniforms rather than the bright scarlet and blue and were armed with breech-loading Martini-Henry rifles.
After seizing Ali Masjid, Browne took his cavalry forward and, by November 23, had occupied Dakka on the plains of Jalalabad for the loss of only 58 men compared with 1000 Afghans killed and 500 captured. Realizing that his situation was hopeless, Sher Ali fled Kabul hoping to put his case directly to the Czar. But the troops which Stoletov had promised to send to his rescue never materialized and Russian frontier units barred his way. He died an ignominious death in February 1879. After wanting initially to carve up Afghanistan into separate kingdoms, Lytton decided to pursue a new treaty with Sher Ali’s son Yakub who was recognized as the new Amir.
In May 1879, Yakub and Lytton’s envoy Louis Cavagnari signed the treaty at Gandamak, scene of the disastrous defeat of the 44th regiment in 1842. It gave Britain control over Afghanistan’s foreign policy as well as all the main passes including the Khyber through the Sulaiman Mountains. Britain was also allowed to station an envoy in the capital. News of the treaty prompted celebrations in Calcutta and telegrams of congratulations for Lytton poured in from London.
The optimism that accompanied Cavagnari’s departure to Kabul was to prove tragically short-lived. Before leaving, he joked that he had a one-in-four chance of coming back alive—so notorious was the Afghans’ reputation for duplicity. His words were to prove prophetic. A month after arriving in Kabul, he and almost the entire British contingent were massacred. Among his last recorded words were: ‘Never fear. Keep up your heart, dogs that bark don’t bite.’20 After he was killed, Cavagnari’s head was placed on a stake by a victorious crowd and paraded through the same bazaar where the body of the previous British envoy had been hung from butchers’ hooks almost forty years earlier.
CHAPTER FIVE
MR 50 PER CENT
IN the incestuous circles of Simla’s European society, Harriet Tytler cut a formidable figure. Born in India, she spoke Hindustani fluently, learning it from her ayah as she accompanied her father’s regiment around the subcontinent. In 1848, she married Robert Tytler, a captain in the 38th Native Infantry, who was almost twice her age. The couple settled in Delhi where they shared a passion for photography, documenting for the first time many of the city’s monuments. When Indian sepoys revolted in what became known as the Great Mutiny of 1857, Harriet was eight months pregnant. As reports came in of the slaughter of Europeans and Eurasians whose bodies had been hacked to pieces and thrown into the Jamuna River, Harriet, her two young children and her French maid escaped northward to Ambala. Extraordinarily, she returned to Delhi when Robert was appointed paymaster to the troops. She was the only British woman in camp during the three-and-a-half-month siege of the city.
After the Mutiny, the couple was transferred to the Andaman Islands where Robert spent two years administering the penal colony before moving to Simla. At Bonnie Moon, his residence, he established an eclectic museum displaying birds from all over the world, shells from the Andamans, oriental manuscripts, including the marriage certificate of the last King of Delhi, and statues from Indian mythology. In 1869, Tytler established the Himalayan Christian Orphanage which accepted destitute and orphaned boys and girls regardless of race. The orphanage was a place where poor children ‘could be rescued from ignorance and neglect’ and were taught useful trades such as ‘gardening, dairy and domestic work’1. Somehow, Harriet also found time to design furniture, sell her paintings and look after her eight surviving offspring.
The death of her husband in 1872, who was responsible, she said, for ‘all I ever learnt’, was a devastating blow. With all her drive and resilience, she struggled to support the family and the orphanage. Two of her children were sent to England to stay with relatives and the orphanage was taken under the wing of a committee of townspeople. To supplement her meagre widow’s pension, she resorted to teaching painting. One of her most promising students was Alexander Jacob.
Tytler first met Jacob in the summer of 1877 when she visited his rooms in Lawries Hotel. He had yet to move to his famous curio shop on the Mall and found operating out of Lawries convenient because of its plentiful clientele. ‘She came to the hotel to see my room. She met me at the theatre one day after that and bowed to me and the next day I called on her,’ he recalled.2
Despite the innocence of their first encounters, Tytler became one of his closest confidants. Over the next few years, she accompanied him on his buying trips to Delhi and the Princely states, promised to follow him to England to sell jewels, and took a close interest in his business affairs. The relationship between the widow and the handsome young jeweller of the East—some twenty years her junior—set tongues wagging, but there is no evidence that it was anything other than platonic. Well-connected and highly respected, Tytler introduced Jacob to anyone who mattered, particularly if there was a potential for doing business to their mutual advantage, often collecting a commission from him or his customers.
Their cosy relationship was rudely interrupted in August 1881 when a summons arrived for Jacob asking him to appear at the Simla district court on September 19. Bringing the case against him was Major-General William Conrad Hamilton. Recently retired from a long but not particularly illustrious career in the Indian Army, he was suing Jacob for 48,688 rupees—more than four times the bonus he had received on his retirement—over a series of jewellery transactions that had gone disastrously wrong. Hamilton alle
ged Jacob sold him a large amount of gems and jewellery with the promise that he would reap a large profit when he resold the jewels in London. Jacob, he claimed, had misled him. Now, he wanted his money back.
Hamilton’s dealings were not unusual. Senior servants of the Raj were paid well. Buying precious stones was a lucrative but sometimes risky way of making a profit. Thomas Macaulay, who was Secretary to the Board of Control, which supervised the administration of India by the East India Company in the 1820s, would have called Hamilton a typical Nabob—members ‘of neither ancient nor opulent’,3 families, sent out to the East at an early age, who returned with large fortunes which they exhibited insolently and spent extravagantly. The most venerable of all Nabobs was Robert Clive who left India in 1766, carrying ‘a million for himself, two diamond drops worth twelve thousand for the Queen, a scimitar, dagger and other matters covered with brilliants for the King’.4
Shrewd trader that he was, Jacob understood the preferences of his European clients. It was an arrangement that served both parties well. Jacob was assured of a steady turnover and his customers usually went away feeling satisfied, even if they had been fleeced, unknown to them. Hamilton was a rare exception.
Tytler acted as a spotter for Jacob. Her social status and her late husband’s circle of contacts in the army and civil service gave her access to a wide circle of people. In October 1878, she heard that Hamilton wanted to invest in jewels part of the bonus he had received on his retirement, and invited him to her house assuring him that she would tell him something ‘which would be to our mutual advantage’.5 She told him of the profits that could be made by buying jewels in India and selling them in London. The trick was to find the right merchant. That man was Jacob.
Like everyone in Simla, Hamilton knew Jacob. He had first seen him in 1876 performing ‘sleights of hand’at Auckland House, formerly the Governor General’s residence. It later became clear that Jacob played on his greed and gullibility, telling him that he had access to the finest jewels. ‘I never saw people like you English; you are satisfied with 4 per cent, much more can be made,’ he told Hamilton at their first meeting at Tytler’s house.6
The next day, Hamilton visited Jacob at his rooms in Lawries Hotel. On each visit, Jacob laid out on a piece of black velvet a collection of gems and jewellery. Referring to Emanuel’s and Streeter’s volumes on precious stones, he pointed out the quality of each gem and the price it would realize in London. Tytler was always present as Hamilton made his selections. ‘I knew Jacob was a foreigner and that he had never been to England,’ Hamilton recalled. ‘He told me he had had transactions with London firms, and that he had left a fair margin for profit.’
The two men met several times over the next few days. Hamilton finally purchased five rings featuring emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds for 3290 rupees which Jacob said would fetch 6250 rupees. ‘I made no bargains. He told me his prices, and I agreed to them, on assurance as to their value in London.’7
A week later, Tytler and Hamilton went to Jacob’s rooms to witness him packing the items in a silk-lined box which he carefully sealed ready for dispatch to Tytler’s son-in-law Captain Thompson in London. Hamilton then made several other purchases including a packet of 584 turquoises which he was selling on commission on behalf of a British officer based in Peshawar for 2450 rupees and a 12-carat emerald for 360 rupees. Jacob told him he could make 50 per cent profit on the jewels.
Tytler wrote out a valuation statement which Jacob signed as ‘Jeweller to H.H. the Nawab of Rampore’. Hamilton was so appreciative of Tytler’s help that he offered her one-third of the profits. He then gave Jacob what was in essence a blank cheque for 10,000 rupees to buy more jewels.
In November 1878, Hamilton travelled to Delhi where he met Tytler and Jacob who were staying at the United Services Hotel. Tytler told him she had borrowed a large amount of money to get more jewels from Jacob and was prepared to go to London with him to sell them. She had just received a letter from her daughter, saying she could not sell the rings that had been sent over for more than she had paid for them. The letter said that only a ‘Jew or a jeweller could deal with London shop people, for her husband had been to numberless shops, and all told him the same’. Jacob dismissed the news, saying: ‘All tradespeople tried to get things as cheaply as possible.’8
Tytler’s response was to urge Jacob to go to England with her: ‘If you were to go to London you could shoot three birds with one stone,’ she wrote immediately afterwards. ‘You would become a naturalized British subject; I would introduce you to good society, take you to be presented to the Queen, and when once you have been to St. James’s Palace, you can go to any court in Europe.’ He could also sell the jewels on her behalf.9
In early December, the pair travelled to Delhi on another buying trip. Jacob had a shop near Maidens Hotel in the European-populated Civil Lines, but the merchants he dealt with were all in the old city around the fabled Chandni Chowk, or Moonlight Bazaar. Now gripped in a state of perpetual traffic gridlock, its air almost unbreathable, it was once considered the finest example of urban planning in the Muslim world. A canal ran down the middle of its central avenue which was lined with the showrooms of gold- and silversmiths, purveyors of pearls, traders in ivory, copper and brass. On either side of the main bazaar, elegant caravanserais provided accommodation for weary travellers, and exquisite multi-storeyed havelis housed merchants and the nobility.
It was a clearly agitated Hamilton who met them at their hotel. He had just received a telegram from England and showed it to Jacob. The five rings he had initially bought realized only £175, much less than what he had paid for them and a fraction of what Jacob had assured him he would get. The turquoises were damaged by sea water on the voyage to England and were unsaleable.
Jacob told Hamilton to return the jewels and that he would refund the money plus pay him 20 per cent. When asked how he could afford to do that, he explained. ‘I said you can see how high the market is; even if I sell them in Delhi I can make 15 per cent profit over and above what I pay you.’10
But Hamilton turned the offer down, holding out in the hope of making a greater profit elsewhere. He then asked whether Jacob would sell his Simla articles in London and what commission he would charge. ‘I first replied very angrily, saying that I never took commission from anybody, but that if I went home I would sell them for him with pleasure,’ Jacob later recalled saying. ‘If you are inclined to give a commission, give it to Mrs Tytler.’11
There was more bad news. A talwar or sword that Jacob had undertaken to sell for Hamilton to the Nawab of Rampur failed to fetch anywhere near the price he had expected. Having exhausted his savings, Hamilton began borrowing money from banks and mortgaged his house at Kasauli. He had less than 3000 rupees of his original bonus left.
Tytler felt confused. ‘He is so dreadfully touchy, that I might only subject myself to a repetition of the row I had last time,’ she wrote to Hamilton. ‘I know better than to contradict him. I can assure you that eating humble pie is not at all in my line. I cannot tell what object he has in telling so many lies. He seems to have every virtue, but every counteracting vice.’12
Tytler did go to London, but without Jacob. She tried selling the jewels she and Hamilton had bought but without success. Frustrated by the delays, Hamilton travelled to London in April 1880 and did the rounds of jewellers in London and Paris. A year later he was back in Simla, convinced he had been ‘grossly swindled’. Armed with a letter from one reputable jeweller saying that some of the items Jacob had supplied were unsaleable at any price, he was determined to seek justice and get his money back.
Normally, civil trials involving a dispute over a business transaction hardly rated a mention in the local press. The case of two European youths, charged with stealing pants and flower pots and fined 40 rupees, was typical of the crimes brought before the Magistrate’s Court in Simla. The case of Hamilton vs Jacob, however, created a minor sensation. A senior servant of the Raj claiming to
have been stripped of his assets by a gem trader whose clients included India’s richest Princes and the Viceroy made good copy. There were also expectations of intimate stories about Jacob’s relationship with one of the heroes of the Mutiny.
Although Hamilton was within his rights in taking the matter to court, by doing so, he unwittingly exposed his own naivety. Jacob retained William Rattigan, an expert in customary law and head of the Lahore Bar, to defend him. The prosecution was represented by Charles Spitta, a much more junior barrister.
Taking the witness stand on the first day of the hearing before Major J.B. Hutchinson, the Judicial Assistant at Simla, Hamilton said he had known Tytler for several years. He recounted his initial meetings with Jacob, telling the judge he had trusted Jacob’s assurances about the profits he would make. Spitta then read from over forty letters between his client and Jacob. As the correspondent of the Pioneer noted: ‘Many of them, as specimens of gullibility, were perfectly unique.’ As for Jacob’s letters, they tended to be ‘very amusing: but in all he declares his inability to sell the jewels, owing, to everybody being “at that cursed Cabul”, and to other reasons’.13
In one letter, Hamilton wrote that a £1500 investment in the ‘judicious purchases of jewels’14 could realize 16,250 rupees if the profits were reinvested, prompting Rattigan to ask him whether six times the price paid was a reasonable and honest profit to make. Hamilton answered he could see nothing wrong with such an expectation, to which Rattigan responded: ‘In other words he expected to make cent per cent on his money, with profits on exchange, three times in one year. Can anything be more suggestive of childlike simplicity?’15
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 7
