Newspaper correspondent William Russell was a veteran of the Crimea and an unlikely griffin, but even he was astonished at the sheer luxury of Indian camp life:
The pole is a veritable pillar, varnished or painted yellow, with a fine brass socket in the centre; from the top spreads out the sloping roof to the square side walls. The inside is curiously lined with buff calico with a dark pattern, and beneath one’s feet a carpet of striped blue and buff laid over the soft sand is truly Persian in its yielding softness. There is no furniture. ‘We must send down to the bazaar,’ says Stewart, ‘and get tables, chairs, and charpoys and whatever else we want … ’.
On going out of my tent I found myself at the centre of a small levee, whilst Simon [a servant], acting as a general master of the ceremonies, introduced to my notice the two kelassies, or tent-pitchers, and a sprite in attendance, the bheesty, or water-carrier, the mehter, or sweeper, all attached to the tent; and then a host of candidates for various imaginary appointments whom I dismissed instantaneously. All these gentlemen salaamed and hit their foreheads in great subjection, and then retired under the projecting eaves of the tent, where they smoked, talked, ate and slept.102
Sensible commanding officers did not permit everything to be unpacked if their regiment was moving on the next day. In Hervey’s regiment, for instance, most of the mess cutlery and furniture remained crated up, and officers travelled ‘camp-fashion’, with his servant (the ‘matey-boy’ in Madras) carrying a chair, some plates, a cup and saucer, knife, fork and spoons, and ‘a pair of silver muffineers, one containing salt and the other pepper’. Governors-general or viceroys travelled very much in military style, from camp to camp, and their ladies sometimes discovered that all had not gone according to plan. In March 1837 Emily Eden reached the Ganges at Pierponty to discover that:
our position is perfectly heartrending … As usual we sent on a set of tents the night before. The first sight that struck us was these same tents on this side of the river and one solitary boat, so here we are, no tents pitched anywhere – eight in the morning, the sun getting high, and such a scene of confusion. All my furniture has been arriving on men’s heads and then it stands. My dear sofa and armchair mixed up with the bullocks, hackeries, palanquins … 103
Even a colonel’s wife, very much the burra mem in her own regiment, might have heaved an exasperated sigh at the notion of travelling so heavy. And even the best planning could not beat the Indian climate. J. W. Sherer, nephew of Peninsular War veteran and diarist Moyle Sherer, was a magistrate travelling with Havelock’s column in July 1857, and reached the camp site only to find that:
The fields where the camp was set up were a sea of mud, and as evening was coming on we struggled into our tent, where we were very uncomfortable indeed. There was nothing to eat or drink; the earth steamed up, and we sat on our beds, drenched as if in a vapour bath. Insects of all sorts were attracted by our light, and either dashed into the flame, or singed their wings and fell onto the table. All the noises of the rains were present: frogs and earth-crickets – with, at intervals, the splashing of showers and bubbling of watercourses.104
From the 1880s onwards most long troop movements were carried out by train. Frank Richards’s battalion arrived in Bombay, drew its hot-weather kit at Deolali, and set off for Meerut. The journey took twelve days, ‘travelling at a very slow pace’. The battalion moved at night, and spent the days in rest camps. Be the march long or short, eventually the regiment arrived at its destination. It marched at attention for the last leg of its journey. Junior officers, who usually rode the line of march, dismounted; the colours were uncased, and the men fixed bayonets and paid attention to their covering and dressing. Bands struck up the regimental march – the tunes of glory like ‘The Young May Moon’, ‘Farmer’s Boy’, ‘Hielan’ Laddie’ and ‘Paddy’s Resource’, shrilling out over an alien landscape – and guards at the entrance to barracks and cantonments turned out to present arms. Sometimes the honours were preserved even on campaign. HM’s 61st Foot marched into camp near Delhi on 1 July 1857,
the white tents of the besieging force appearing in sight about eight o’clock. Then the band struck up ‘Cheer, boys, cheer!’ and crossing the canal by a bridge we entered camp.
Crowds of soldiers, European as well as native, stalwart Sikhs and Punjabees, came down to welcome us on our arrival, the road on each side being lined with swarthy, sunburnt, and already war-worn men. They cheered us to the echo, and in their joy rushed amongst our ranks, shaking hands with both officers and men.105
The band of the 61st was up to its task, but a few days later Lieutenant Charles Griffiths was sitting in his tent with the regiment’s bandmaster, Mr Sauer, who was a German, as so many bandmasters were, when
we were saluted with the sound of distant music, the most discordant I have ever heard. The bandmaster jumped up from his seat, exclaiming: ‘Mein Gott! Vat is dat? No regiment in camp can play such vile music.’ And closing his ears immediately rushed out of the tent.
The Kashmir troops were marching into camp, accompanied by General Wilson and his staff, who had gone out to meet them, their bands playing some English air, drums beating and colours flying. There was no fault to be found in the appearance of the soldiers, who were mostly Sikhs and hillmen of good physique; but … the shrill discord of their bands created great amusement amongst the assembled Europeans.106
BARRACKS AND BUNGALOWS
DURING THE EARLY YEARS of British occupation, troops were quartered in forts, notably Fort William in Calcutta and Fort St George in Madras. Barracks were built and rebuilt within both structures; the four-storey Dalhousie Barracks in Fort William remains the largest single barrack block in the world. But as the East India Company extended its grip, purpose-built barracks were constructed, grouped together to form military cantonments outside towns, usually alongside the civil lines that housed the official Europeans, and often with rifle ranges, training grounds and a broad maidan between cantonment and the town it was meant to secure. Even early barracks were widely regarded by the troops as being infinitely preferable to tents.
In 1841, on his eighteenth birthday, Nathaniel Bancroft at last became a full member of the Bengal Horse Artillery, as a trumpeter. He had previously been that un-pensionable hybrid: a half-pay gunner in boy service. He and his comrades arrived at Cawnpore in a sweltering April:
were told to occupy one of the vacant barracks, an agreeable change from canvas. The troops took up their quarters, and the 400 infantry recruits were marched off to the infantry lines. Khus-khus tatties [screen mats, made from the roots of an aromatic grass and bamboo] were placed in the doorways of the barracks, which were plentifully sprinkled with water by coolies entertained for the purpose, and had the effect of causing the barracks to be tolerably cool during the day. There were no punkahs allowed in those days, and at night the men slept outside the barracks in the open.107
Major Bayley, at Umballa in 1854, just before the Mutiny sharpened the edge between cantonment and town, described how:
On the extreme left space was allotted for three regiments of native infantry, and on their right for a regiment of European infantry, on whose right European cavalry were placed; in whose right rear were the native cavalry; in some distance in rear of the infantry line was the civil station.
All along the front, which at Umballa was about a mile and a half long, barracks for the Europeans and mud huts called ‘lines’ for Indians were constructed; the officers being considerately allowed the option of living in their tents or building bungalows for themselves. Under these circumstances they would receive increased allowances of pay which went towards the rent of a house when one was built. Sooner or later, houses sprang up on the ground allotted to the different corps. Most of these were built by the officers themselves, though a few were the property of European or native speculators – and a very good investment they were, as they were seldom unoccupied, and a house which had cost £200 to build let easily for £60 a year. Officers who h
ad been obliged to build were only too glad to recover some of their money, when they got the route for a distant station, and so most of the bungalows eventually became the property of shopkeepers and merchants resident there.108
After the Mutiny a nervous government increased the proportion of British to Indian soldiers, and expensive new barracks were built in major centres such as Allahabad, Meerut and Delhi. By the 1860s there were 175 cantonments, great and small. At Allahabad the neatly gridded Cannington, with its public buildings, lay between the North Cantonment and the New Cantonment, in a bend of the Ganges, with a railway line linking cantonments and town. Lahore, which came into British hands after the Second Sikh War, had its own large cantonment, Mian Mir, south-east of the town. The accommodation in cantonments, some of them built as soon as the British arrived, was not always well maintained, and in 1897 Lieutenant Colonel Thomsett complained that although Peshawar was ‘a very pretty little station’ it was still:
possessed of, and disfigured by, the same old dilapidated-looking bungalows which I remember stamped the place years ago, and I have no hesitation in saying that people at home would not put a cow into some of them. My dressing room would have struck terror into the hearts of many a London British soldier, and one could only imagine it as a haunt of scorpions, centipedes, snakes and rats.109
Albert Hervey described the huge cantonment at Bangalore as:
A very extensive one, widely scattered, but at the same time laid out in regular lines of houses, which are in general well built and compact, with enclosures, or compounds, according to the size of the dwellings. Many of the houses are large, and the rooms have fireplaces, in consequence of the cold during certain seasons of the year. The appearance of the cantonment from the rising ground outside is certainly very pretty; the substantial buildings, the neatly trimmed hedges, the well made roads, and the church peeping out from among the trees, the soldiers quarters and other barracks, and public stores, all form a striking picture to the eye of the stranger.
There is a large force maintained here, composed of horse-artillery, dragoons and native cavalry, foot artillery, European and native infantry, sappers and mines and so on, intended chiefly to hold the Mysoreans in check.110
But the presence of a catonment was not all bad news for the civilian population. The historian C. A. Bayley estimates that a single battalion of European infantry might generate an annual demand on the local economy of 4–5 lakhs of rupees per annum, including items purchased by individual soldiers and those bought by the army on his behalf. In 1817, 1,200 residents of the village of Bokhapur, near the military centre of Meerut, obtained their livelihood by ‘daily labour in or near the cantonments’. There was a brisk trade in spirits and cheroots, the repair of garments gave employment to an army of Moslem tailors, and the European consumption of meat, huge by Indian standards, made meat contractors and cattle breeders prosperous. Most of this business brought cash into the local economy.111
In 1826, Bessie Campbell, then married to Captain Niel Campbell of HM’s 13th Light Infantry, told a friend that it was no loss for her never to have seen Dinapur:
The cantonment is situated in a wide sandy plain, interspersed with mango topes. The houses are built in squares, the centre grass, and round these is the fashionable evening drive. These buildings make a very good appearance for their regularity, and are really comfortable and spacious houses. On the side of the square where we live my neighbours are on one side Fenton [whom she would later marry after the death of Captain Campbell the following year] and Blackwell, next the paymaster, Mr. Wright; on the other side is Captain Aitken and Mr Wilkinson. I occupy the centre; Colonel Sale commences the next range. The persons on the opposite side of the square are Captain Denham, Mr Snelling … the Quartermaster Sheridan … next the adjutant Hutchings, who went out to the West Indies with Niel as his servant, and whose good conduct and ability has advanced him.
This is called a very gay station. There have been a succession of balls, parties, plays, since my arrival. For these I have very little relish, and even if I had, the delicacy of my health would prevent me attending them.112
Officers and their families almost invariably lived in bungalows. Unmarried officers often banded together, two or three together, to form ‘chummeries’ in bungalows where they slept, entertained, and ate the meals that they did not take in mess or club. Violet Jacob’s bungalow at Mhow in central India in 1895 was a good deal better than most:
Imagine yourself on the porch and coming up some steps. You go up across the verandah and through the front door that opens into the drawing room; it has a fan-light and is very tall. All the outside doors and windows have wire shutters like meat safes to keep out insects. They are a great luxury here. The drawing room is about the height of Dun kirk [the church at home in Dun, Angus] and a sort of chancel arch runs laterally across the middle; it has six doors running down each side of it and opening into other rooms and the effect is rather pretty, as all have fan-lights over them. There are seven windows and nineteen ventilators so there should be plenty of air. We’ve got stone floors instead of the mud ones which most bungalows have and all the whitewash is tinted pale green. There’s a crimson drugget, the wicker chairs are all painted white and the general effect isn’t bad at all.113
The deeper one went into the mofussil the more spartan the bungalows became. When Helen Mackenzie reached Ludhiana in 1848 she had already been warned that it was ‘one of the ugliest stations in the country’. She lived in the compound of the American Presbyterian Mission, in a bungalow with a wide verandah on three sides, ‘the back one crowded all day with orderlies, bearers, tailors, tent-pitchers, dog-boys and white-uniformed chaprassies (whose function combined that of messenger and commissionaire)’. There was a row of ‘mud rooms’ for the servants in the outer compound, and a kitchen building equipped with a few pots, ‘a kettle, a saucepan and a spoon’.114
Khus-khus tatties, which both cooled the air and made it fragrant, were common in the hot weather, and the punkah, a large cloth fan on a frame, swung constantly by the punkah-wallah, was universal. Some households (and some barrack buildings too) were equipped with a thermantidote, a very primitive form of air-conditioning. A large circular wooden housing perhaps seven feet high, modelled on a winnowing machine, was connected to a window by a large funnel. It contained revolving fans, and drove a current of air through a wet tattie into the room. Outside the bungalow was a garden, usually watered by water drawn from a well by a bullock and fed into irrigation channels. The best that could be said was that one could often grow several crops of roses a year. But over-watering sometimes encouraged mosquitoes, and snakes were not uncommon, especially in the rainy season.
What seemed unhealthy to an officer’s wife would have been sheer luxury to a private’s. In 1859 only about a quarter of Indian barracks had separate accommodation for married men and their wives. These were small bungalows, built in the barrack yard, with two or three rooms apiece. Most families lived in compartments off the central barrack room occupied by the men, or in barrack rooms specially set aside for them. But a few still survived in the barrack room itself, with blankets or screens to give at least a little decency. Frank Richards rather admired the wife of one of his commanding officers, because:
She frequently used to pay visits to the soldiers’ wives in married quarters, though of course the same wide gulf that was fixed between officers and men separated their women-folk. I often did grin at some battalion outdoor function, such as Regimental Sports, to watch the ladies in their different social classes collect in groups apart from one another; one group of officers’ wives with the Colonel’s wife in command, another of the senior NCOs’ wives with the Regimental Sergeant Major’s wife in command, and then the wives of the sergeants, corporals and privates, each group parading separately.115
The high death rate amongst soldiers in barracks – in 1852 it was 58 per 1,000 as opposed to 17 per 1,000 for troops in Britain – appalled some senior officers
, amongst them the bearded and bespectacled Charles Napier, conqueror of Sind. An attempt was made to station a third of the British garrison of India in barracks in the healthy hills. The new cantonment built at Jakatalla in the Nilgiri Hills in the Madras presidency was perhaps the most striking: ‘it all looked more like a health resort than a military camp’. A parade ground 800 feet square was surrounded by two-storey barrack blocks with arcades below and verandahs opening off the spacious soldiers’ accommodation on the first floor.116 Even in the larger cantonments of the north, barracks built in the latter half of the nineteenth century were more comfortable than their equivalents in Britain. Although there was sometimes no more than a foot between beds, at least the verandahs and high ceilings ensured ample air and light. Private John Fraser found that there was ‘a certain nobility’ to the barrack blocks at Agra, and
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