Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  India House extended three hundred feet behind its frontage, terminating in warehouses. Somewhere in the rambling complex was the library, and from 1801 a museum, or ‘Oriental Repository’, open to visitors. On the upper floors of the four-storey building were the Departments, with warrens of offices divided into cubicle-like compartments, off dingy passages. The clerks, six to a compartment, sat hunched over their desks on uncomfortably high stools. (Raffles developed a pronounced stoop.)

  The essayist Charles Lamb, diminutive and fragile, joined the Company as a clerk in the Accountant’s Department at the age of seventeen, three years before Raffles arrived. He called India House ‘a drear pile’ with its ‘labyrinthine passages and light-excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for one half of the year supplied the place of the sun’s light.’ Outside work, Lamb combined a febrile social and literary life with caring devotedly for his sister Mary, who was intermittently psychotic. Mary had a bad turn at dinnertime on a Monday in September 1796. She killed their mother with the carving knife. Everyone knew, so probably fifteen-year-old Raffles did too. Some men broke down, others turned to drink. In 1800 the clerk to the Committee of Buying threw himself out of his office window. Lamb worked in India House for thirty-three years, becoming, he said, as most clerks did, ‘doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages’, and retired with a pension two-thirds his salary. ‘Doggedly contented’ would never describe Raffles.

  The actual work, unless like Lamb in the Accountant’s Department one were dealing with figures, was copying letters, reports, memos, drafts, abstracts and despatches, with quill pens taken from bunches, hour after hour, day after day. Raffles and his fellow clerks were human word-processors. The Company generated mountains of written material, as every document had to be copied and recopied many times.

  Official letters arriving from India were first read by the Court of Directors then distributed among the relevant offices of the Examiner’s Department, where abstracts were drawn up to be reconsidered by the twenty-four Directors. Meanwhile the Examiner’s Department collected up all the documentation which might be relevant in drafting replies, and ‘narratives’ were composed, providing the context or back-story for any given problem.

  Draft replies were circulated to the members of the Board of Control who scrutinised them at their leisure and returned them to India House with emendations. Revised drafts were submitted to the Committee of Correspondence, where they were approved – or not. The final drafts became despatches and were sent to India. Copies of every document generated were filed in leather-bound folio volumes.

  Lord Minto, Governor-General of India from 1807 to 1813, writing to his wife from Calcutta, described the process in reverse. He had not only despatches and letters from London to deal with, but also from the other two presidencies, Madras and Bombay, and from lesser settlements, out-stations and factories. (Not factory as in manufactory, but as in an entrepôt overseen by a factor.) At the twice-weekly Council meetings in Calcutta, which lasted from ten in the morning till three or four in the afternoon, the secretaries read aloud the substance of each paper. Lord Minto found it hard to stay awake.

  These procedures took months at each end. Add to that the six to ten months it took for a ship to reach England from Calcutta and vice versa. If a despatch from London was destined for, say, Malacca (Melaka), there was further delay. By the time it reached its destination, either some course of action, whether proposed or deplored, had become irrelevant owing to changed circumstances, or had been implemented months before.

  The surreal time-lags, which were later to get the impatient Raffles into hot water, applied not only to official despatches, to news of changes in Company policy and of defeats and victories in the war against Napoleon. Personal letters, bringing news of marriages, births and deaths, of safe arrivals of loved ones or of tragedies at sea, were all subject to displacement in time. All stories were back-stories, all responses retrospective. Out East, one lived in the present, waiting for the past to catch up. The resulting psychological dislocation contributed to the often irrational behaviours of the servants of early Empire.

  India House was the hub of that Empire, in prickly partnership with Parliament. The Company had its own army for defending and securing its settlements in India and around the fringes of the East Indies – ‘the Eastward’ – today’s Indonesia and Malaysia. The Company appointed its own surgeons, chaplains, police and law officers in its settlements. The Company had its own civil service, abroad as at home. The Company both chartered and built its own fleet of East Indiamen, flying in Eastern seas the Company flag – red and white lateral stripes with the Union Jack in the upper corner nearest the flagstaff. The ships’ officers wore the Company uniform – blue coat with black velvet collar and cuffs, buff waistcoat and breeches, a black stock and a cocked hat.

  The East Indiamen, most of them over one thousand tons, anchored for loading and unloading along the length of the Thames from Blackwall Reach to the Pool of London. They picked up passengers at Gravesend or at the deep-sea ports of Portsmouth, Falmouth and Plymouth on the south coast. The captain of an East Indiaman bought his ship from the owner, the ‘ship’s husband’, and was poorly paid by the Company. He made his money by selling on the surplus of food allowed for the voyage, by charging heavily for passengers, sometimes by smuggling. Serious money came from private trading. A large tonnage was allowed to a ship’s commander who, if he was shrewd, could make enough by two or three ‘double voyages’ to retire in comfort – if, that is, he did not get sick and die, and if he and his vessel escaped shipwreck.

  Raffles, in his ten years at India House, transcribed millions of words, and retained throughout his life his practised, clear, flowing handwriting and a facility for composing lengthy ‘narratives’. His was the time of long everything – long journeys, long speeches, long dinners, long sermons, long poems, long scholarly papers, long book reviews, long personal letters, long reports – and long attention spans. Only death moved swiftly. Whether in Britain or out East, you could dine with a friend one day, and hear of his death from some sudden fever or infection the following afternoon.

  Excess of verbiage was matched by excess of privilege. Admirals, generals, and senior administrators were rewarded with titles, treasure and trinkets, and vaunted them. There was a culture of immodesty and a bonus culture of extravagant ritual gifts – subscriptions raised for those moving on or retiring; douceurs in foreign negotiations and trade agreements; cuts, bribes and commissions.

  Society was intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich out East – ‘shaking the pagoda tree’ as the phrase was – unless they went too far, like Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General in Bengal who, after a trial lasting seven years, was cleared of peculation, bribery, injustice, oppression, cruelty, tyranny and murder in 1795, the year in which Raffles entered India House. Warren Hastings came up against a parallel culture personified by nonconformists, industrialists and ‘new men’ – a culture of good governance, Enlightenment values, evangelicalism, radicalism – with a groundswell demand for public morality and social reform, plus a semi-lunatic fringe of visionary millenarianism. Most people picked and mixed, Raffles among them. He had Enlightenment values and liberal principles. He also liked to move in the great world and Establishment circles. He liked honours. He was not greedy for money. He wanted fame, and he wanted to do good.

  Raffles caught a whiff of the world beyond Walworth at India House, from the documents he copied and the topics and personalities he heard discussed. He was continuing his education on his own in ‘stolen moments’ before he left for India House in the mornings and after he came home to East Street in the evenings – about three miles’ walk each way. ‘I contrived to make myself master of the French language, and to prosecute enquiries into some of the branches of literature and science… I shall never forget the mortification I felt when the penury of my family once induced my mother to complain of my extravagance in burning a candle in my room.’
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  The overworked boy became unwell, was given two weeks off work and, according to his second wife Sophia in her Memoir, used the time not to rest but to walk all the way to Wales and back, covering thirty miles a day, whether alone or with a friend we do not know. He ‘returned to his desk with restored health.’ The story has an apocryphal air. But Raffles’ energy and resilience were always extraordinary.

  Raffles made a close friend among his fellow clerks in William Brown Ramsay. In July 1800, the month of Raffles’ nineteenth birthday, both young men were promoted to the status of Junior Clerk, on £70 a year. What was happening in the Raffles family around that time is a mystery. The Times, on 10 May 1800, carried under the heading ‘Leasehold Houses’ an advertisement for ‘A Genteel, substantial Dwelling House, pleasantly situate, No 10 Camden-Street…let to Capt Raffles, tenant at will, at a net rent of £25 per ann., held for 63 years, at a low ground rent.’ There is no Captain Raffles on record other than Raffles’ father. It sounds as if he were the sitting tenant. Normally, one would assume that the whole family had moved to Camden Street. But knowing how Captain Raffles’ life ended, and that Mrs Raffles was frequently ‘distressed’ over money, it is likely that he had separated from his wife and children. His problem was probably gambling. His son would never attend a race-meeting.

  Young Ramsay, Tom Raffles’ new best friend, was the son of the Secretary of the Company, also William. He was already working for his father in the Secretary’s Department, where Raffles now joined him. The Secretary’s House had its own street entrance within the precincts of India House, making it easy for William Brown Ramsay to take Tom Raffles round to meet his parents.

  The position of Secretary was central to the Company’s operations. All correspondence with the Board of Control passed through the Secretary’s Department, as did all the papers connected with the proceedings of the Court of Directors and the Committee of Correspondence. Listening to Mr Ramsay, Raffles learned about the Company’s operations and the fortunes lost and won on the other side of the world.

  The Ramsay household showed Raffles a way of life and a set of assumptions with more latitude and wider horizons than could be discerned from East Street. His social and imaginative ranges were enlarged. One can pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps only so far. In the life of every obscure person who becomes successful there are one or two mentors or patrons who see a potential, and have the means and the will to activate it. The first of these, for Raffles, was Mr Ramsay, and the opportunity came in 1804.

  The Company had three ‘Presidencies’ in mainland India – Madras, Bombay and Bengal. Of these Bengal, centred on Calcutta (Fort William), was the senior. The Governor-General of India, in 1805 Richard Wellesley, was the Company’s representative. The ‘Governor-General in Council’, whence all communications and directives issued, called the shots.

  The Company possessed two settlements on the Strait of Malacca in the eastern Archipelago, on the coast of the Malayan peninsula – Malacca itself, and, 250 miles southwards the island of Penang. On behalf of the East India Company, Captain Francis Light had leased possession of the island from the Sultan of Kedah on the mainland in 1786 and gave it the official name of Prince of Wales Island; he called the settlement Georgetown, after the reigning monarch. The fort at Penang was Fort Cornwallis, after the Governor-General of the time. In 1800 the Company bought a slice of the mainland. This outpost was named Province Wellesley, after the Governor-General. Never did such modest and unprofitable territory sink under such a weight of noble names.

  The value of Penang was that it gave the Company a trading post and a harbour towards the south of the Strait of Malacca, a pirate-infested stretch of water on the all-important trade route to China. The British Government, in the face of Dutch and French aggression, wished to develop Penang as a naval dockyard, and the Company agreed to upgrade its establishment and defences; Penang was to become a fourth Presidency, on a par with Bombay and Madras, with its own Governor and Council. This meant that a full establishment of Company civil servants must be sent out to supplement the handful already there.

  There were scores of bright young men in India House, though not all of them would have wanted to leave home for the unpredictable East. Tom Raffles did. Mr Ramsay recommended him, writing to Sir Harry Inglis, an elderly and influential Director and former Chairman of the Company, that the loss of this young man in his Department would be like ‘the loss of a limb’ to him, yet he felt bound to recommend him on account of his ‘superior talents and amiable private character.’ In March 1805 Raffles was appointed Assistant Secretary for Penang, at the massively improved salary of £1,500 a year.

  This spectacular advancement, like his closeness to the Ramsays, did not make him popular. A boy called Robert Ibbetson, in line for a cadetship at Penang, remembered waiting for his father in a room in India House where there was a lighted fire at which clerks took turns to warm themselves. There were two other clerks beside himself in the room. ‘One of these was standing by the fire, when the other came and, with a kick, sent him away. The one who was removed from the fire in so undignified a manner was Mr Raffles who became the celebrated Sir Stamford Raffles.’

  Captain Thomas Williamson, retired from twenty years in the army in Bengal, wrote for the East India Company a handbook for their young men going out East – The East India Vade-Mecum. His other main work was Wild Sports of the East. In his Vade-Mecum Captain Williamson addressed the question of making settled relationships with indigenous women.

  He was for it, with some caveats. ‘The attachment of many European gentlemen to their native mistresses is not to be described! An infatuation, beyond all comparison, often prevails.’ Most kept women were Muslim, often with Portuguese blood. They expected an allowance, with clothes and service provided. He did not advise Company servants marrying a local mistress. The Court of Directors would not approve. An Indian or Eurasian wife would not be invited to public occasions. There was no objection to common-law wives, living with the children in a different house. This arrangement was usual among even the most senior civil servants and military officers.

  It was an arrangement that Raffles himself was not going to make. His appointment as Assistant Secretary of Prince of Wales Island was announced on 8 March 1805. On 14 March, he got married. He was twenty-three. His bride was Olivia Mariamne Fancourt, née Devenish. She was thirty-three, tall, dark, good-looking, high-spirited – and he loved her.

  They were married in London in St George’s Church, Bloomsbury. Their witnesses were Richard Tayler, a lawyer of Gray’s Inn who was to look after Raffles’ affairs when he was abroad; his uncle Charles Hamond; and two women, Maria Walthen and Mariamne Etherington. The coincidence of the unusual name ‘Mariamne’ suggests that this last was a relative of Olivia Mariamne’s.

  Raffles chose to marry a widow ten years older than himself, and there has been much speculation about Olivia’s life before she knew him.

  The inscription on her memorial in Java, which Raffles erected, says that she was ‘Born 1771 in India’. There was a family belief that she was born in Madras and then sent back to Ireland, and that her mother, who was not married to her father, was Circassian. That would account for her un-British good looks.

  To be Circassian is to be from the Northwest Caucasus, but it meant more than that in Olivia’s time. The phrase ‘Circassian beauty’ was a cliché for exotic female desirability. Byron in Don Juan wrote of a Circassian slave girl whose loveliness raised the bidding at auction until none but the Sultan could afford her. In the early 1800s cosmetics, lotions and hair-dyes were advertised in the most extravagant terms as containing essences used by Circassian women, the most beautiful women in the world. An opera called The Circassian Bride opened at Drury Lane in February 1809. The very word ‘Circassian’ had erotic overtones.

  Raffles’ Circassian bride already had a child. No one would ever have known, had not the novelist Charlotte Louisa Hawkins-Dempster, in the first chapter of her memo
ir The Manners of My Time (1920), revealed that her grandmother, the heiress of John Hamilton Dempster of Skibo, was ‘his illegitimate daughter, Harriet Milton’; and that Harriet’s mother was Olivia Mariamne Devenish of Co Roscommon, ‘partly Irish and partly Circassian, and whose beauty finally secured for her, in 1803 [sic], a union with Mr Stamford Raffles.’

  ‘Milton’ was the surname the Dempsters gave to Olivia’s daughter. The rest of the paragraph in which this bombshell was embedded is so riddled with inaccuracies about Olivia and Raffles as to be verbal cobweb; what Mrs Hawkins-Dempster thought she knew had been passed down from generations of family and servants, like Chinese whispers. But she surely knew who her own grandmother and great-grandmother were.

  The father of Olivia’s daughter, Captain John Hamilton Dempster, known as Jack, was the illegitimate younger half-brother of prosperous George Dempster MP, Laird of Dunnichen in Scotland, and a Director of the East India Company. Captain Jack, aged thirty-five, may have met and bedded the teenaged Olivia Devenish when his ship the Rose was detained by Customs in Cork for several months in 1785. Their daughter Harriet, according to the tablet to her memory in Ashburton Church in Devon, was twenty-five when she died in 1810. (Her date of birth was not recorded, but she would have been born in 1786.) Before the birth, in October 1785, Captain Jack had married Jean Fergusson, old George Dempster’s god-daughter. Captain Jack was grounded, and Olivia put to one side.

  Captain Jack and his wife Jean had a son in 1786, idolised by George Dempster, who added to his properties Skibo, a Highland castle with 18,000 acres, hoping that Captain Jack would settle there with his family. But Jack made a further voyage with the Rose, to Madras and Calcutta, in 1792. Olivia Devenish, now twenty-one, sailed with him. In February 1793 they reached Madras, where three months later Olivia was married, to Joseph Cassivelaun Fancourt, Assistant Surgeon in the Company’s service.