by Pat Barr
The thorniest of Low’s problems was the Malay custom of debt bondage, whereby ordinary people who had incurred any kind of debt (or, sometimes, simply been accused of debt) were taken as slaves by their village chiefs or the rajas. As all available monies and resources were in the hands of their masters, it was well-nigh impossible for slaves to free themselves once in bondage, and, worse yet, their families and descendants were permanently enslaved also. In consequence, there were a lot of bondspeople in the Malay States and some were ill-treated and abused. Naturally, every British Resident, fired with something of the zeal and example of Wilberforce, abhorred the vicious system and worked to abolish it; Birch, for instance, when he was Resident used to harbour runaway slaves, which was said to be a major reason for his murder. Low proceeded with more caution, understanding that, though the slave tradition was deplorable from a western viewpoint, it had been firmly rooted in the native mores for centuries and that, in the master’s eyes, their slaves belonged to them as rightfully and absolutely as did their houses, wives and elephants. Cajoling, advising, offering restitution, Low finally won, and slavery was officially abolished in Perak in 1884 – a quiet achievement that at the time did not receive very much attention from the outside world.
But Hugh Low didn’t count on popular esteem; like Isabella, he was an original – solitary, slightly eccentric, sensitive and unassuming. He and she were bound to like each other and they did. He appreciated her independent unfussiness and her genuine, intelligent interest in his work; she admired his honest diligence, his tactful kindliness, above all the total absence of that blustering arrogance which had been such an ignoble characteristic of the Resident of Selangor. In the evenings, when the palms stood quiet and black against a cool-lemon twilight and the green-gold lamps of the fireflies jogged among the poinsettias, Low at last relaxed, lit his pipe and talked with his guest. They talked, of course, about personalities – about the unfortunate Birch, a high-handed and officious fellow, in Low’s view, who drank too much and more or less deserved his fate. Probably they talked about Mr Pope-Hennessy, Governor of Hong Kong, whom Isabella had recently met and whose brand of pushy brilliance and rash idealism was anathema to both of them. Certainly they talked about the tyrannous reign of Bloomfield Douglas, and Low assured her that some two thousand Malays had actually fled to Perak to escape it.
They paused, perhaps, to watch a lizard zoom along the walls after flies, pausing that split-second before he actually swallowed his terror-struck victim; ‘even a lizard gives the fly time to pray’, Low quoted the Malay proverb. Then he went on to tell his guest about his experimental garden where he was trying to raise a number of small rubber-plants. They were, he said, two different sorts of South American indiarubber and had been sent from the Botanical Gardens in Singapore. These plants, though he did not yet know it, were to be historic. They grew into healthy trees eventually; in 1884 they shed their first seeds and Low invited planters to come to Perak and invest their capital in rubber instead of coffee – which was proving a risky venture. No one took him up at the time, and it was not until the turn of the century, years after Low had left Perak, that the rubber industry began to flourish there. But he could perhaps take comfort in his old age from the fact that part of the first consignment of rubber sent to London from Malaya in 1899 was produced from the seeds of those plants in his Kuala Kangsa garden.
That garden and its attendant livestock were Low’s sole indulgence. He grew American corn and tobacco and tried to grow coffee, he bred turkeys and Nellore cows imported from India, and kept goats, sheep, ducks and widgeon for the table. Every guest commented how good the food was, and with it, on special occasions, the Resident served iced champagne – which could have unforeseen results. On February 18, Isabella notes in her journal, ‘Major Swinburne and Captain Walker arrived in the morning and we had a grand tiffin at twelve, and Mahmoud was allowed to sit on the table, and he ate sausages, pommeloe, bananas, pineapple, chicken and curry and then seizing a long glass of champagne, drank a good deal before it was taken from him. If drunkenness were not a loathsome human vice, it would have been most amusing to see it burlesqued by this ape. He tried to seem sober and to sit up, but could not, then staggered to a chair, trying hard to walk steadily, and nodding his head with a would-be witty but really obfuscated look, then finding that he could not sit up, he reached a cushion and lay down very neatly, resting his head on his elbow and trying to look quite reasonable, but not succeeding, and then he fell asleep.’
Mahmoud woke bright-eyed and bustling as ever, but poor Eblis with the wistful face who cooed ‘ouf ouf’ when he was happy and screamed ‘wah wah’ when he was frustrated, completely lost his appetite and began to sicken. Hugh Low coaxed him with morsels of banana and poured drops of milk down his throat every half-hour. It was an affecting sight: ‘The poor bewitching thing, which is much emaciated, clings to his master now the whole time, unlike other animals, which hide themselves when they are ill, puts out its feeble little arms to him with a look of unspeakable affection on its poor pinched face, and murmurs in a feeble voice “ouf ouf!”’ Poor Low was so miserable about Eblis that he nearly cried over him, Isabella tells Hennie, and he wrote to his daughter (now the Governor’s Lady in Hong Kong) that ‘he had never cared for anything in the world as for Eblis, except for her’.
Perhaps because he was feeling especially lonely just then, Low asked Isabella if she would like to stay for another month at Kuala Kangsa, and reinforced his invitation with a rare compliment: ‘You’ve the pluck of six ordinary men,’ he told her, ‘and you glide about the house and never speak at the wrong time – if men are visiting me they never know when to be quiet but bother me in the middle of business.’ And then the lively, odd little ‘Perak crowd’ positively deluged her with compliments. Maxwell, who had come over to see his chief, agreed that she was easier company than most men, and the dashing Swinburne, quite converted, said ‘I admire you more than any woman I know – you know you are a splendid traveller – you know exactly what you can do and can’t do.’ Maxwell concurred in that too, saying he had suspected she was a ‘real traveller’ the moment he saw her land in Penang with ‘only a bag and a roll’. And Isabella, not really accustomed to so much masculine acclaim, laughed and said well, yes, it was the one talent about which she was often complimented. Then added, ‘without thinking’, she explains to Hennie, ‘“But I am always despised at first.” At which they never ceased to laugh, but it is quite true, for my bodily presence is weak and my speech contemptible. And just because I “make no fuss” I generally lose a day or two at first by people thinking that I can’t do the thing I have come to do.’
She didn’t pursue the matter further, but it is interesting to note that Isabella saw herself as others sometimes saw her. Her manner was ‘that of a gentlewoman’ people recorded, perfectly self-possessed, but lacking flair or dash. Her voice, if not ‘contemptible’ was apparently slow, earnest, rather monotone, so that, initially, people tended to talk over her head – taking advantage of her diminutive stature. That was what Isabella meant, and it was an honest assessment, though, in later years, she fully compensated for her ‘weak bodily presence’ by an increasingly substantial reputation. But when she was in Malaya she still felt a little insecure at first encounters and so cherished these compliments from the men and carefully recorded each one for Hennie’s benefit in a burst of naïve pride. And really it was quite an achievement for an unescorted middle-aged spinster to find her feet so capably and be so thoroughly well-liked in the uncompromisingly bachelor ambience of the Perak crowd. But then, an absence of womankind was, in Isabella’s view, frequently a blessing. ‘I think that Perak is fortunate in not having English ladies. You have no idea of the total want of occupation for any but the best kind of women,’ she told Hennie, ‘and they tattle and make mischief and create jealousies and undermine civil servants with a view of pushing forward their husbands and keep the little communities in constant hot water. There is not a Europea
n woman within a twelve-hour journey of Kuala Kangsa, and it is a happy thing.’ One of the nearest was poor Emily Innes of whom Isabella had undoubtedly heard, and she was a case in point.
Yet, in spite of the cordiality and the lack of female tittle-tattle, the delights of ape and elephant, and the beautiful wild peace of her surroundings – of the fact, in short, that she liked ‘Kuala Kangsa better than any place I have been in Asia’, she refused Low’s invitation to stay. She was ‘disgusted with herself’ for doing so, but confessed to Hennie, ‘I cannot live longer without your letters and they, alas, are at Colombo’ (whither she had originally been bound). So she left, pulled homeward, as many another traveller, by the invisible, infrangible thread of anxious love. She departed the Residency on a pony while the Royal Elephant carried her baggage, and it was absurd to see the grand beast ‘lie down merely to receive my little valise and canvas roll, with a small accumulation of Malacca canes, mats, krises, tigers’ teeth and claws …’ The sun had barely risen, globules of dew rolled along the pineapple leaves and tigers had only just retreated to their lairs, but Low was at his desk already, writing and nursing the sick Eblis at the same time, while the wild siamang peered down cheerily from the roof-beam.
As she rode through the jungle tracks, the early mists floated away in rose and gold, apes hooted their morning hymns to the sun, birds screeched, butterflies and orchids flopped in the hot light, dragonflies and honeysuckers shimmered. Isabella’s eyes shone with the joy of it all, a joy that verged on sadness as her thoughts veered towards that ‘dim pale island’ to which she was returning.
Just before her final departure, Isabella received a telegram from Low: ‘Eblis is a little better this morning. He has eaten two grasshoppers and has taken his milk without trouble, but he is very weak.’ It was the only crumb of good news that mitigated her passionate regret at leaving, which suffuses the last paragraph of her book: ‘We sailed from Penang in glorious sunshine at an early hour this afternoon and have exchanged the sparkling calms of the Malacca Straits for the indolent roll of the Bay of Bengal. The steamer’s head points north-west. In the far distance the hills of the Peninsula lie like mists upon a reddening sky. My tropic dream is fading, and the “Golden Chersonese” is already a memory….’
Part Two
A LADY’S LIFE
CHAPTER V
The Clergyman’s Daughter
‘HOW singular people all seem to me now who live on our dim, pale island and wear our hideous clothes,’ Isabella remarked in a letter written one bright and carefree day under a tropical sun. And yet, when she returned from her travels in 1874 (with her collections of Hawaiian fern-prints and the kitten beaver fur presented by her favourite trapper), and again in 1879 (with her daimyo’s bath and the claws of a Perak tiger) she quietly merged into the sober landscape of home. She reverted, as a friend put it, to ‘the timorous, delicate, gentle-voiced woman that we associate with Miss Bird of Edinburgh’. This second Miss Bird, who waited in the wings with a discretion proper to her sex and class, took competent command once Isabella had left the challenge and stimulation of foreign parts. It was she who set most of the scenes for the first forty years of their common life, she who was best known and best beloved by family and friends, she whom one would expect to emerge from her particular clerical nest. It is she who now deserves some attention.
Isabella Lucy Bird, born 15 October 1831, ‘came of good stock’, as the Victorians put it. The most dynamic and intellectual strain came through the family of her father, Edward Bird, which was quite closely related to the Wilberforces, and numbered among its members an impressive selection of eminent bishops, missionaries, clergymen and clerical wives. Running true to form, Edward, after first going to Calcutta as a barrister where his wife and infant son died of cholera, returned to England, became a clergyman and married Dora Lawson, a clergyman’s daughter. The Lawsons, like the Birds, were responsible, solid members of the upper middle classes, and their family home was Boroughbridge Hall in Yorkshire, where Isabella was born.
The world into which she came was secure, earnest, dutiful, kindly, devout. Among many of her relatives there was a strong, even passionate, urge towards practical Christian philanthropy. Aunt Mary was a missionary in India; her own mother used her pocket-money to hire a room for the holding of Sunday school classes; one of her cousins, another Mary Bird, later became a well-known missionary in Persia; and outstanding in the family annals was the name of William Wilberforce. He died when Isabella was only two years old, but his example as liberator, humanitarian and Christian gentleman was honoured by them all, most especially, says Anna Stoddart, by ‘the lingering maiden ladies’ of the clan, ‘who treasured as mementoes of their great kinsman, lines inscribed by him on the blank leaves of their Bibles’.
Isabella’s father did not make his total commitment to Christianity until he took orders at the age of thirty-eight, and for the next decade he worked at it with the obstinate zeal and dedication of the latecomer. He must have been an impulsive, passionate, uncompromising man, his rather frail physique stretched to breaking-point by the demands of his highly-strung temperament, and his elder daughter, who was like him in many ways, loved him fiercely. They moved to Tattenhall in Cheshire when Isabella was still an infant, and there a second girl was born and named Henrietta – after one Aunt Henrietta who, according to Anna Stoddart, ‘had strong views on infant baptism and renounced on their behalf her clerical lover, at the sacrifice of her life’. Little Hennie’s role too was to be partly one of renunciation in the cause of the stronger elder sister who dominated her life. Henrietta, we are told, was a faithful, unobtrusive, studious, gentle, dreamy child and she kept those qualities throughout her days – and chief of them was constancy.
Few ‘cute’ anecdotes of Isabella’s childhood survive, but this one, from a friend, illustrates much: Isabella at the age of six sat listening to a gentleman ‘who was canvassing Tattenhall in his own interest and who excited her distrust by his too obviously expressed admiration of lovely little Henrietta. She marched up to him and asked, in her incisive tones, “Sir Malpas de Grey Tatton Egerton, did you tell my father my sister was so pretty because you wanted his vote?”’ It showed a considerable grasp of language for a six-year-old to get such a very gentlemanly name correct! More significantly, the incident suggests two important facets of Isabella’s character: a possessive, obsessive, rather masculine devotion to Henrietta (her protective stance before Sir Malpas is typical elder-brotherly); and secondly, a determined desire to free the truth, even if unpalatable, from the shackles of social hypocrisy. Throughout her life Isabella detested pretension and sycophancy, and in later years, when her pen had a certain power, she could not abide those who flattered her because, as it were, they wanted her vote.
Edward and Dora Bird were cultured, observant people; they soon realised that their elder daughter was endowed with exceptional intelligence and keen perspicacity, and they fed her eager mind with robust fare. She read no children’s books, heard no baby talk, they found her lying in the stables quite absorbed in Alison’s French Revolution when she was but seven. She had no formal schooling, but studied literature, history, drawing, French and the Scriptures at her mother’s knee, learned Latin and botany from her father and later pursued her own studies into chemistry, metaphysical poetry and biology. As she had but one quiet sister, her days were not filled with childish romps, but each year the family went to Grandfather Bird’s house at Taplow Hall where, in middle-class Victorian fashion, all the relatives gathered for the summer holidays, and all the children played together.
The Hall was spacious, with stables, paddocks, shrubberies and fields of clover where the ‘Taplow grandchildren’ could run reasonably wild. The days there began solemnly, Anna Stoddart says, with the family and all the servants ‘outdoor as well as indoor … summoned to hear the Squire read the lessons and a prayer for the day out of “Thornton’s Prayers”’. On the lawn was an aged mulberry tree, and the adults gathered benea
th its shade in basket-chairs, sipping wholesome beverages, chatting, reading and writing letters, while their children raced and tumbled about the bordering banks of thyme, yarrow and bedstraw. The drawing-room was dignified with satin-wood tables, pot-plants and a piano around which the family again assembled in the evenings to sing appropriate airs, such as The Captive Knight and The Curfew Bell.
‘The Taplow grandchildren,’ says Miss Stoddart, ‘breathed an atmosphere of “causes”.’ Letters from clerical relatives in India, ‘framed with decorum for general reading’, contained pathetic stories of poverty, moral degradation, spiritual barrenness, and urged the need for greater missionary endeavour; a guest, on leave, say, from some mission hospital in China or West Africa, told his tales of heathen suffering; the short-sighted maiden aunts, whose spectacles ‘gave them an expression of sternness quite foreign to their natures’, were stern nevertheless about their daily drinking of sugarless tea in the cause of West Indian slavery, long after the slaves had, in fact, been emancipated. The fervour of Protestant guilt ran high: it was early made clear to Isabella how lucky was her lot compared with that of the uneducated grass-hut native, the unwanted baby in the Calcutta streets. The relatively few abandonments to utter joy she ever knew were bound with that guilt, that deep sense of moral obligation towards the less fortunate.
