Strange Men Strange Places Read online

  As the building has changed little in the past 150 years, a modern aesthete or architect would probably be more critical in his description of Constantia than was Warren Hastings. But Lucknow was never noted for its architecture. It was, and is, noted for its charm; and Constantia is very much a part of Lucknow's charm.

  During the last fifteen years of his life Martine suffered considerably from a stone in the bladder. He cured himself temporarily, but the disease recurred, and he died in 1800, at the age of sixty-two.

  Earlier that year he had drawn up his will, which was a fascinating document. It contained over forty clauses, and began by "acknowledging with penitence that self-interest has been my guiding principle throughout life." After providing for Lise, he left his entire fortune in the form of charitable legacies. Amongst them were three for the poor of Calcutta, Chandernagore and Lucknow, the interest from which was to be given to the poor at regular intervals. To this day it is still done at Lucknow.

  He left a large sum in trust to the Government of Bengal for the establishment of the Martiniere school in Constantia, and for schools at Calcutta and his native Lyons, with special provisions for children from needy families. Knowing that the Nawab envied his house and wished to buy it, Martine stipulated that he should be buried in the basement floor, thus desecrating the place in the eyes of the Nawab: no Mohammedan may inhabit a tomb.

  "When I am dead," went this remarkable clause in Martine's will, "I request that my body may be salted, put in spirits, or embalmed, and afterwards deposited in a leaden coffin made of some sheet lead in my godown, which is to be put in another of sissoo wood, and then deposited in the cave in the small round room north-east in Constantia, with two feet of masonry raised above it, which is to bear the following inscription:

  Major-General Claude Martine,

  Born at Lyons, January 1738,

  Arrived in India as a common soldier, and died

  (at Lucknow, the 13th September 1800) a major-general;

  and he is buried in this tomb.

  Pray for his soul.

  When Lady Fanny Parkes visited his tomb in 1831 she mentioned that a bust of the general adorned the vault, that lights were constantly burnt before the tomb, and that it was guarded by four life-size plaster sepoys, with arms reversed, placed in the four corners of the room.

  The plaster sepoys have long since gone. Probably they were destroyed when, in 1857, real sepoys occupied and ransacked Constantia, destroying Martine's tomb, and scattering his bones about the vault. Later the bones were recovered, and the tomb and inscription restored. Fortunately the plaster soldiers could not be restored, for they were samples of Martine's sometimes dubious artistic taste. A lover of the ostentatious, Martine did occasionally show good taste, and at his death his library contained more than 4000 books in Latin, Italian, French, English, Persian and Sanskrit, and he left a collection of a hundred and fifty oil paintings, amongst them forty-seven paintings and sketches by Zoffany and a complete set of Daniell's views of India. A private soldier without any formal schooling, he died a general and a patron of the arts. No other adventurer managed to be both!

  It is by the Martiniere school that Martine is best remembered today. If it were not for his charitable legacies, his name would have been forgotten along with those of other minor soldiers of fortune, for he did not distinguish himself as a soldier or statesman; but he was an adventurer of another sort — an enterprising speculator, and one of the few Europeans who were able to adapt themselves happily to an Indian way of life without completely cutting themselves off from the customs and comforts of their homeland.

  Today, most of the boys at the Martiniere are Indian; many have European forbears. At a dinner on the anniversary of Martine's death they still drink a toast to "The Memory of the Founder".

  THE STORY OF A HILL STATION

  ISITORS TO Mussoorie frequently find themselves persuaded to climb to the top of a local peak called "Gun Hill", from which they are able to enjoy a view of both the plains and the Greater Himalayas. They will also see the Mussoorie waterworks; but of a "gun" there is no sign, and they may be pardoned for wondering how the hill acquired its impressive name. The writer hopes to enlighten them on this, and other aspects, of the hill station's distant though not ancient past.

  Before 1919, the Mussoorie public used to be told the time at noon by the firing of a gun from the peak known as "Gun Hill". Perhaps guns were cheaper than clocks in those days; I cannot think of any other sound reason for the system. It was not very popular with the local residents. At first the gun faced east, but soon after its installation (shortly after 1857), Miss Bryan of "Grey Castle Nursing Home," and then Miss Hamilton of the same institution, complained that when the gun was fired "it often loosed plaster from the ceiling of the wards, which fell on patients' beds and unnerved them". It could not be pointed north, because it would then have blasted away Mr. Yerborough's house, "Dilkusha"; so it was faced north-east, and almost immediately came a complaint from "Crystal Bank". Turned to the south, it almost succeeded in fulfilling its legitimate duty: the gunner forgot to remove the ramrod from the barrel; on booming noon to the populace, the cannon sent the ramrod clean through the roof of "Stella Cottage".

  Public opinion was now mounting against the gun, and it was turned around once more — to face the Mall. Its boom was usually produced by ramming down the barrel a mixture of moist grass and cotton waste, after the powder was in place. Due to an accidental overcharge of powder, one of these cannon-balls landed with some force in the lap of a lady who was being taken by dandy down to the plains. It was the last straw — or, to be exact, the last straw cannon-ball — for the gun was dismantled soon after this incident.

  A peep into the life of a hill station before the turn of the century provides us with much interesting matter on European social life during that period. But before giving the reader further anecdotes, I should fill in the background with a brief historical sketch of Mussoorie.

  In the year 1825, the "Superintendent of the Doon" was a certain Mr. F. J. Shore who found time from his of official dudes to scramble up to the hills then known as "Mansuri" because of the prevalence of a shrub known in the vernacular as the Mansur plant. He found that these hills had a number of flat areas, some of which accommodated the huts of cowherds who grazed their cattle on them during the summer months. Game was then plentiful in the hills, and the first construction was a shooting-box built jointly by Mr. Shore and Captain Young of the Sirmur Rifles. The first home, still recognizable, was "Mullingar" on Landour hill, built in 1826 by Captain Young. Soon Landour became a convalescent depot for British troops, and settlers began flocking to Mussoorie, building houses as far apart as "Cloud End" in the west and "Dahlia Bank" in the east, separated by a distance of some twelve miles. In 1832, Colonel Everest (after whom the mountain is named) as Surveyor-General opened his Survey of India office in "The Park" and made a road to it. Mussoorie is the original home of the department.

  People came to Mussoorie for both business and pleasure, and amongst the pleasure-seekers we find the Hon'ble Emily Eden, sister of Lord George Eden, Earl of Auckland, Governor-General of India. In her journals she records that "in the afternoon we took a beautiful ride up to Landour, but the paths are much narrower on that side, ;and our courage somehow oozed out, and first we came to a place where they said, 'This was where poor Major Blundell and his pony fell over, and they were both dashed to atoms' — and then there was a board stuck in a tree, 'From this spot a private in the Cameroons fell and was killed'. . . . We had to get off our ponies and lead them, and altogether I thought much of poor Major Blundell! But it is impossible to imagine more beautiful scenery."

  Though there were no proper roads in Mussoorie in those pioneer days, it is probably safe to assume that a number of cliff-edge accidents were caused by the beer that was then so cheap and plentiful in the hill station.

  Mr. Bohle, one of the pioneers of brewing in India, started the "Old Brewery" at Mussoorie in 1830
. Two years later he got into trouble for supplying beer to soldiers who were alleged to have presented forged passes. Mr. Bohle was called to account by former Captain, now Colonel Young, for distilling spirits without a licence, and had to close his concern. But he was back in 1834, building "Bohle's Brewery".

  However, the big push in the brewery business really began in 1876, when everyone suddenly acclaimed a much improved brew. The source was traced to Vat 42 in Whymper and Company's "Crown Brewery". The beer was re-tasted and re-tested until the diminishing level of the barrel revealed the perfectly brewed remains of a human being! Someone, probably drunk, had fallen into the beer barrel and been drowned, and, all unknown to himself, had given the beer trade a real fillip. Apocryphal though this story may sound, I have it on the authority of A Mussoorie Miscellany, its author going on to say that "meat was thereafter recognised as the missing component and as scrupulously added till more modern, and less cannibalistic, means were discovered to satiate the froth-blower".

  A bold, bad place was Mussoorie in those days, according to the correspondent of The Statesman who, in his paper of twenty-second October 1884, wrote: "Ladies and gentlemen, after attending church, proceeded to a drinking shop, a restaurant adjoining the Library, and there indulged freely in pegs, not one but many; and at a Fancy Bazar held this season, a lady stood up on her chair and offered her kisses to gentlemen at Rs 5 each. What would they think of such a state of society at Home?"

  Fortunately a Statesman correspondent was not present at a 1932 benefit show, when a Mussoorie lady stood up and auctioned a single kiss, for which a gentleman paid Rs 300!

  In spite of these goings-on, or perhaps because of them, the inhabitants were conscious of their spiritual needs, and a number of churches were soon dotted about the hill station. The oldest of these is Christ Church (1836) whose chaplain almost a hundred years later was the fairminded Reverend T. W. Chisolm. In his usual Sunday service prayers in the year 1933, he sought God's help for Pandit Motilal Nehru, who was then seriously ill. There was an immediate storm in all official teacups and the chaplain was reprimanded. This caused one local writer of the time to comment, "that in these years of our Lord, Holy Orders can be interpreted to mean wholly Government orders."

  Another public-spirited Mussoorie citizen was Captain A. W. Hearsey (a member of the famous Hearsey family, which had once owned large areas of the Dun). He was one of the first Anglo-Indian members of the Indian Congress. He had spoken at an All-India Congress Session, and a certain English language newspaper, in its report of the proceedings, referred to him as "a brown man who called himself a military captain." Without any delay, Captain Hearsey armed himself with a horse-whip, made a long train journey, and descended on the offices of the newspaper. On finding that the reporter in question was away on furlough, he said the editor would suit his purpose equally, and bursting into the editor's office, proceeded to horse-whip him. The litigation that followed evoked widespread interest at the time.

  It is easy enough to get to Mussoorie today, but how did they manage it before the advent of the railway and the automobile? Of course, Mr. Shore and Captain Young merely scrambled up the goat tracks to get there; and Lady Eden used her pony to canter along paths and "up precipices"; but in the good old, old days (before the turn of the century), one detrained at Ghaziabad (some one hundred and fifty miles from one's destination), engaged a village bullock-cart, and proceeded in the direction of the Siwaliks as fast as only a bullock-cart can go. After that, one either walked, rode a pony, or was carried uphill in a doolie.

  Later, the bullock-cart gave way to the dak-ghari and the tonga, and soon after the opening of the Hardwar-Dehra railway in 1901, the tonga was ousted by the motor car and the bus. Up to that time, the main overnight stop was at Rajpur, not Dehra, and the hostelries and forwarding agencies at Rajpur were the "Ellenborough Hotel", the "Prince of Wales Hotel", and the "Agency Retiring Rooms of Messrs. Buckle and Company's Bullock Train Agency". All are now in ruins.

  There have been very few changes in Mussoorie during the last twenty years. Prices and taxes have gone up, but they have done so everywhere. The houses are still the same, many of them built in the last century. Some have been kept up quite well, others are in ruin. Rickshaws still ply on the Mall, and coolies still carry heavy loads up and down steep paths. There are more hotels (mostly for the middle-classes) and fewer boarding-houses. There are more schools. There are more restaurants. There is, in fact, more of nearly everything, except beer. At Rs 5 a bottle, Mussoorie's beer-drinking days are all but over.

  The only edifices in the vicinity of this hill station that might pass muster as "ancient monuments" are the impressive ruins of the old breweries. They have all fallen down: sad reminders of the gay days when beer was less than a rupee a bottle, and only kisses were expensive.

  A HILL STATION'S VINTAGE MURDERS

  HERE IS LESS CRIME in the hills than in the plains, and so the few murders that do take place from time to time stand out as landmarks in the annals of a hill station.

  Among the gravestones in the Mussoorie cemetery there is one which bears the inscription: "Murdered by the hand he befriended." This is the grave of Mr. James Reginald Clapp, a chemist's assistant, who was brutally done to death on the night of thirty-first August 1909.

  Miss Ripley-Bean, who has spent most of her eighty-seven years in this hill station, remembers the case clearly, though she was only a girl at the time. From the details she has given me, and from a brief account in A Mussoorie Miscellany, now out of print, I am able to reconstruct this interesting case and of a couple of others which were the sensations of their respective "seasons".

  Mr. Clapp was an assistant in the chemist's shop of Messrs. J.B. & E. Samuel (no longer in existence), situated in one of the busiest sections of the Mall. At that time the adjoining cantonment of Landour was an important convalescent centre for British soldiers. Mr. Clapp was popular with the soldiers, and he had befriended some of them when they had run short of money. He was a steady worker and sent most of his savings home, to his mother in Birmingham; she was planning to use the money to buy the house in which she lived.

  At the time of the murder, Clapp was particularly friendly with a Corporal Allen, who was eventually to be hanged at the Naini Jail. The murder was brutal, the initial attack being launched with a soda-water bottle on the victim's head. Clapp's throat was then cut from ear to ear with his own razor, which was left behind in the room. The body was discovered on the floor of the shop the next morning by the proprietor, Mr. Samuel, who did not live on the premises.

  Suspicion immediately fell on Corporal Allen because he had left Mussoorie that same night, arriving at Rajpur, in the foothills (a seven-mile walk by the bridle-path) many hours later than he was expected at a Rajpur boarding-house. According to some, Clapp had last been seen in the corporal's company.

  There was other circumstantial evidence pointing to Allen's guilt. On the day of the murder, Mr. Clapp had received his salary, and this sum, in sovereigns and notes, was never traced. Allen was alleged to have made a payment in sovereigns at Rajpur. Someone had given Allen a biscuit-tin packed with sandwiches for his journey down, and it was thought that perhaps the tin had been used by the murderer as a safe for the money. But no tin was found, and Allen denied having had one with him.

  Allen was arrested at Rajpur and brought back to Mussoorie under escort. He was taken immediately to the victim's bedside, where the body still lay, the police hoping that he might confess his guilt when confronted with the body of the victim; but Allen was unmoved, and protested his innocence.

  Meanwhile, other soldiers from among Mr. Clapp's friends had collected on the Mall. They had removed their belts and were ready to lynch Allen as soon as he was brought out of the shop. The situation was tense, but further mishap was averted by the resourcefulness of Mr. Rust, a photographer, who, being of the same build as the corporal, put on an Army coat with a turned-up collar, and arranged to be handcuffed between two policem
en. He remained with them inside the shop, in partial view of the mob, while the rest of the police party escorted the corporal out by a back entrance. Mr. Rust did not abandon his disguise or leave the shop until word arrived that Allen was secure in the police station.

  Corporal Allen was eventually found guilty, and was hanged. But there were many who felt that he had never really been proved guilty, and that he had been convicted on purely circumstantial evidence; and looking back on the case from this distance in time one cannot help feeling that the soldier may have been a victim of circumstances, and perhaps of local prejudice, for he was not liked by his fellows. Allen himself hinted that he was not in the vicinity of the crime that night but in the company of a lady whose integrity he was determined to shield. If this was true, it was a pity that the lady prized her virtue more than her friend's life, for she did not come forward to save him. The chaplain who administered to Allen during his last days in the "condemned cell" was prepared to absolve the corporal and could not accept that he was a murderer.

  One of the hill station's most sensational crimes was committed on twenty-fifth July 1927, at the height of the "season" and in the heart of the town, in Zephyr Hall, then a boarding-house. It provided a good deal of excitement for the residents of the boarding-house.