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Personal accounts put, as it were, some flesh on these bones. Albert Hervey lamented ‘one of our ensigns, a fine lad’ who died of ‘putrid fever’.
When dead, the body was wound up in a wax cloth, to admit of its being lifted into the coffin. Decomposition had commenced before the vital spark had been extinct; and so infectious is the disorder considered, that his clothes and bedding were all burned, and the room, corpse, coffin etc sprinkled with vinegar.138
In May 1857, Julia Inglis discovered some ‘suspicious marks’ on her body, and was pronounced to have smallpox: ‘Not pleasant news,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘at such a time especially.’139 Minnie Wood suffered from a painful combination of boils and ulcers, and wrote to her mother:
I can hardly move for boils, and you cannot imagine, dear Mama, how much I have suffered through the carelessness of Dr Cole and the ignorance of the nurse at the baby’s birth. You will understand what I mean when I say what I was told was piles was not, but was one ulcer after the other, so dreadful that at times I could not move my leg but had to be carried from my bed. This has been going on for months, and at last, in despair, I came down here to Lahore for advice.140
In besieged Lucknow scurvy took hold, and ‘took the form of loose teeth, swollen heads, and boils, and gained the name of “garrison disease”’.141 Burma and large parts of India were malarial: in 1875 all but five soldiers of the 75th Regiment, in garrison at Cherat and Peshawar, were more or less affected, and ‘large numbers undoubtedly had their constitutions permanently impaired’.142 Bessie Fenton believed that India could, in itself, bring on depression:
It is remarkable and grievous, too, the languor and gloom that gains ascendancy over many young people here, invading all classes of society, ages, and conditions of life; indeed I think the young are more frequently the victims of this malady than those advanced in life … I know of two young men who have attempted to commit suicide for no other reason than weariness of themselves. There is a friend of mine who is a talented and amiable man who says, ‘How thankful I should be now to die!’ When I speak to him of the duty of living to amend ourselves and others, he will reply: ‘Yes, it is both easy and well for you to reason, you have an exciting motive, you afford and receive happiness. But in the loneliness of my darkened habitation, where I am denied air and light, what recourse is left to me but to turn gambler or brandy-drinker?’143
HOT BLOOD, BAD BLOOD
IN THIS LAND OF SUDDEN DEATH and ambient discomfort there was much for European women to put up with. Not least of their trials were the quarrelsome temperaments of their menfolk. Not all memsahibs were, strictly speaking, ladies. George Elers, that well-groomed officer, salaciously recounted how in 1801 Major William Sturt of HM’s 80th Foot, ‘after committing all sorts of follies, concluded by marrying a beautiful woman of the establishment of a notorious woman living in Berkeley Street, a house much resorted to by men of fashion’. She arrived in India’without a sixpence’ and, with her husband far away up-country, wrote to ‘her old friend’ (and, so Elers implies, former client) Colonel Wellesley, who immediately sent her a banker’s order for £400.144
In any case, a lady’s impeccable pedigree was not necessarily proof against cupid’s darts. One subaltern was court-martialled for behaving disrespectfully to his commanding officer by sleeping with his wife, and was sentenced to be cashiered. But General Sir Charles Napier, Commander in Chief, India, decided that the fruit which the young man had stolen ‘had not required much shaking’, and quashed the sentence.145 In 1836 a sixty-year-old major in the cavalry found his young wife in bed with a cornet, and challenged the man to a duel. The major missed with his first shot, and forced a second round, in which the cornet obligingly shot him dead. Although duelling had, by that time, largely disappeared in Britain, it was still so well established in India that no disciplinary action was taken and the cornet was simply posted to another regiment.
In 1791 William Hickey found Calcutta society ‘much divided and very violent’ about the quarrel between Lieutenant Colonel Showers of the Company’s service and Lieutenant O’Halloran, ‘a strong-backed Irishman who lived on terms of the greatest intimacy with the Colonel and his family’. Colonel Showers accused O’Halloran of taking ‘unwarrantable liberties’ both with his wife and with ‘a young female friend who lived under their protection’. When O’Halloran demanded an explanation the colonel would not provide one, so O’Halloran ‘sent him a challenge for infamously aspersing his character’, but the colonel would not fight. The officers of Colonel Showers’s regiment felt that his action reflected on them, and drew the matter to the Commander in Chief’s attention. Showers was court-martialled for ‘ungentlemanlike behaviour’ and eventually dismissed the service.146
Had Showers fought and survived his career would almost certainly have survived intact. Major Samuel Kilpatrick of the Bengal army was killed in a duel in 1781, and his adversary Captain Richard Scott was court-martialled for having been ‘an accessory to his death’. The court concluded that:
Having well considered the evidence against the prisoner Captain Richard Scott, together with what he has urged in his defence are of the opinion that the charge against him has been fully proved, but as throughout the whole course of the proceedings many circumstances occurring … favourable and alleviating, they do therefore acquit him of any degree of criminality and he is hereby acquitted accordingly.
Signed George Mackenzie,
Major 73rd Regiment and President147
Duels could be provoked by almost anything. In 1797 a duel took place on Ceylon, in which the officer who had given offence received the fire of his adversary and then apologised. He then turned on the man’s second and declared that he had delivered the challenge in an insulting manner, adding: ‘Be so good as to take his place and give me satisfaction for the insult.’ The challenger was shot dead at the first exchange of fire.148 Colonel Henry Hervey Aston of HM’s 12th Foot had a reputation as an accomplished duellist, having ‘been out’ several times before he arrived in India. With ‘the advantage of birth, fortune and figure’ he was given to quizzing, that is, staring hard at ‘some odd-looking people’. This behaviour had led to a quarrel with a Mr Fitzgerald in London’s Ranelagh pleasure gardens, and when Fitzgerald ‘began to be saucy and showed fight’, Aston beat him up, and joked, looking at his battered opponent, that ‘he would do’. Fitzgerald immediately challenged him and pistolled him through the face, ‘carrying away one of his double teeth, the Irishman very facetiously observing that “now he would do”’.
While Aston was away from his regiment in Madras in 1797, Major Picton, who commanded in his absence, summoned an officers’ meeting to investigate a dispute in which Aston had suggested that the paymaster, Major Allen, had not treated a subaltern ‘liberally’. The meeting concluded that Aston’s judgement had been unfair: Aston returned as soon as he heard the news, and reprimanded Picton for calling the meeting. Picton at once called him out, but the duel was not a success. Picton’s pistol missed fire and he threw it on the ground in a rage. Aston urged him to try again, but the seconds would not allow it, and so Aston fired in the air. The two men shook hands and agreed to dine together. But on the following Sunday, Allen asked the colonel about exchanging out of the regiment. Aston replied that as Allen was senior captain (he was a major only by brevet) it would not be wise to leave. But added that ‘with respect to your feelings I am ready to atone in any way you wish’. He added that he was surprised that it had taken so long for Allen to ask: he had deliberately avoided formally resuming command of the regiment so that junior officers could fight him without breaking the rules of discipline.
Before going out to duel with Allen, Aston told the adjutant to ask any other officer who wished to meet him to come out at once, as ‘he was ready to satisfy them one after the other, and finish the business altogether’.
The Colonel and [his second] Captain Craigie happened to arrive on the ground a few minutes before Captain Allen and hi
s second, an assistant-surgeon of the name of Erskine. Captain Allen apologised for keeping him waiting, adding: ‘I am sorry upon my soul, Colonel Aston, that it should ever come to this.’ Colonel Aston merely said: ‘Take your ground, Sir.’ The distance was measured. Allen fired and from the circumstance of the colonel standing perfectly upright with his pistol levelled the seconds concluded that the ball had passed him. The Colonel dropped his pistol arm, and said: ‘I am wounded, but it shall never be said that the last act of my life was that of revenge.’ Poor Allen ran up, threw himself on the ground, and was quite overcome with sorrow and remorse. The Colonel was assisted into his palanquin, and met one of his officers, a Lieutenant Falla, soon after himself killed before Seringapatam. ‘Well, Falla,’ said the Colonel, ‘I have got a confounded lick in the guts, but I hope I shall get over it.’
Aston died a week later. Both Picton and Allen were arrested, tried by court martial and acquitted: Allen was also tried in a civil court and likewise acquitted. But he ‘never held up his head afterwards. He died in less than three months of a raging fever.’149 Aston’s death gave Arthur Wellesley one of the greatest breaks in his career. Aston had been the senior officer in the area where the Madras army was concentrating for its attack on Seringapatam, and Wellesley took over from him. He also inherited Aston’s grey charger Diomed, which Aston passed on just before he died.
Duelling, properly speaking, was confined to officers. In January 1760, Commissary Chandler and Conductor Vaus, who had a history of bad blood, met outside the house in Bombay where a sale of goods was being carried out. Both drew their swords, and ‘Chandler gave Vaus a wound in the right breast which was so deep that it pierced his lungs’; Chandler immediately deserted to the Marathas. There were no seconds; the affair was a brawl rather than a formal duel, and in any event both combatants were on the fringe of gentility.150 Private soldiers settled matters with their fists, often with officialdom turning a blind eye. Shortly before the assault on the Begumbagh at Lucknow in March 1858, Privates Johnny Ross and George Puller of the 93rd Highlanders were playing cards with their mates in a sheltered corner when a dispute arose. The word to fall-in was given and as they rose Puller told Ross to ‘shut up’. Ross immediately felt a smack in the mouth.
Johnny immediately thought it was Puller who had struck him, and at once returned the blow; when Puller quietly replied, ‘You d—d fool, it was not I who struck you; you’ve got a bullet in your mouth. And so it was: Johnny Ross put up his hand to his mouth and spat out a few front teeth and a leaden bullet. He at once apologised to Puller for having struck him, and added, ‘How will I manage to bite my cartridges the noo?’151
Not only were NCOs and men denied the lethal solace of duelling, but, perennially short of available European women, they were condemned to the scarcely less lethal consolation of prostitution. During the 1830s the rate of venereal disease ran at between 32 and 45 per cent in British regiments in India. There were repeated attempts to bring down the rate by the medical inspection of prostitutes and the use, from the late eighteenth century, of ‘lock hospitals’ in which infected women were compulsorily confined. The results were decidedly ambivalent: VD amongst British troops in Bengal was at its lowest in the 1830s, after the lock hospitals were temporarily closed, and in 1808 the rate in HM’s 12th Foot doubled despite the establishment of a lock hospital. In 1833 one RHA battery in Poona had 41 per cent of its men affected: another in the same garrison had just 13.5 per cent. In 1864 the Contagious Diseases and Cantonment Act of India provided for the registration of prostitutes and the control of brothels. First-class prostitutes (the term is almost military in its regard for rank) serviced British soldiers, and were supplied with a printed list of rules and a form for monthly medical inspections. Second-class prostitutes, for the Indian community, were unregulated. Charges were rank-related, and in the 1890s: ‘sex was quite cheap: the standard was one rupee for a Sergeant, eight annas for a Corporal, six for a Lance Corporal and four for a Private’.152
Even before the 1864 Act, British units in India had maintained regimental bazaars (‘lal’ – red – bazaars, known as ‘rags’ to the troops). These were in effect brothels, supervised by an ‘Old Bawd’, an experienced procuress, who was paid a salary by the canteen fund, with their occupants subject to regular medical inspection. Some medical officers like Surgeon Alexander Ross, who had been recommended for the VC in China, argued that this was the way ahead. But one visitor was shocked to find ‘a large formal portrait of “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India”’ in ‘one of the shops of this market of licensed sin’, while a bishop of Calcutta argued that if the system worked it would actually encourage immorality because it ‘made sinning safe’.153
During the 1880s the rates of venereal disease continued to rise, and there were various attempts to encourage men to visit registered prostitutes rather than their unsupervised sisters, and, to ensure that these women were numerous enough to keep pace with demand. In 1886 the quartermaster general told commanding officers to ensure that the women in their lal bazaars ‘are sufficiently attractive’, and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Parry of 2nd Battalion the Cheshire Regiment at once requisitioned ‘extra attractive women’ from the cantonment magistrate at Amballa, arguing that he had only six women for 400 men. The medical officer at Faizabad asked that his girls should be replaced by ‘others who are younger and better looking’, and the Deputy Surgeon General of Peshawar District announced happily that ‘efforts have been made and with some success to provide a more attractive lot of women’.
The Quaker publisher and reformer Alfred Dyer was a good deal less impressed. After a fact-finding tour of India he published a series of articles in one of his newspapers, and ensured that the matter was discussed in Parliament. The Anglican bishops of India and Ceylon declared that ‘the discouragement and repression of vice’ was far more important than mitigating the effects of ‘vicious indulgence’. Two representatives of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union visited India in 1891–92 to inspect lal bazaars, visit lock hospitals and interview prostitutes. The 1864 Act was amended in 1895 and again in 1899, and this last change reflected a victory for military logic: despite the protests, the lal bazaars were there to stay, with even more stringent conditions and an increasing emphasis on telling soldiers of the risks that they ran.
Lieutenant Richard Fortescue Purvis knew the risks from bitter experience: referring to the treatment for syphilis, he wrote to his brother outlining the dangers – ‘One night with Venus – six days with Mercury’ – and telling him that he was right to seek a wife and so avoid another ‘wound in the wars of Venus’. Young officers who did not want to make semi-permanent arrangements could, as Purvis candidly admitted, avail themselves of ‘those of the Cyprian class’. Writing at a time when the status of mixed-race children was declining, Purvis admitted that he was concerned as much by the risk of fatherhood as by that of disease. In India there was, he explained to his brother,
such an extensive variety that a little extra caution and a little extra cash will always provide security against scrapes of that fatal nature; at least it is chance if otherwise. For my part, since I trod the paths of Venus I have made but one impure connection and my sufferance was of the slighter kind – vous comprenez, j’espère. My dread of furnishing you with ‘whitey-brown’ nephews, as you call them, is a sufficient argument to deter me from keeping a Sable Venus to tuck my clothes in at night etc.154
Private Frank Richards’s friend the prayer-wallah took extra care. ‘In addition to antiseptics and prophylactics,’ wrote Richards, ‘he possessed a powerful magnifying-glass which he used to handle with the professional manner of an old family doctor.’155 Scarcely had Private Richards arrived in India than he encountered prostitution. His battalion, on its way by train to Meerut, was in the rest-camp at Jhansi, and plague was raging in the city. He went down to a small stream with some of his friends to wash their feet, and before long an Indian appeared:
w
ith half a dozen girls walking in file behind him: they seemed to be all between fourteen and twenty years of age. He said the girls were plenty clean and were from the brothel in the Sudder Bazaar where only the white sahibs visited. If we wanted to go with one of them we could have our pick, and it would only cost us six annas. The word reached the camp of what was in progress and in less than no time a large number of men appeared on the scene. The native took the money while the girls did the work. The stream was very handy; it enabled the girls to wash themselves and they did not mind in the least who was looking at them while they were doing this.156
There was a brothel for soldiers in the bazaar at Agra, with only 30–40 women to deal with the 1,500 men in the garrison:
Our Regimental police relieved one another patrolling the small street which the Rag was in. Natives who passed through this street were not allowed to stop and talk to the girls; if any one of them did, the policeman would give him such a thrashing with his stick that he would remember it for a long time. The Rag was opened from twelve noon to eleven at night, and for the whole of that time the girls who were not engaged would stand outside their shacks soliciting at the top of their voices and saying how scientific they were at their profession …