This is the writer Ela Sen. It's the first time I've seen a photo of her. The image she's gazing depicts a meeting of Tagore and Gandhi. Among the books Ela Sen wrote was a powerful first-hand account of the Bengal famine of 1943-4, Darkening Days. I blogged about that book some years ago, and that post recently caught the attention of Ela's son. It transpires that Srikumar Sen lives just walking distance from me in London. And this week I had the pleasure of meeting him. This blog is about both mother and son. Ela Mitter was a Bengali - the family home was in Park Circus in the most fashionable part of Calcutta. Sen was the name of her first husband (and Srikumar's father) - the marriage ended in divorce. Ela's second husband was Alec Reid, at the time the news editor of the main Calcutta daily paper, The Statesman - the paper which, under the editorship of Ian Stephens, did so much to expose the truth about the wartime famine and the at least partial culpability of the colonial authorities. They lived at the top of Statesman House in the heart of Calcutta. As well as for her writing, Ela is remembered for setting up a progressive women's group which met in her top floor apartment, the Mahila Atnorakhya Samity. She was very much on the left. Not a Communist, says Srikumar, but perhaps a fellow traveller. Her best friend, Betty Hutheesing (or more formally Krishna Nehru Hutheesing), was Jawaharlal Nehru's younger sister. Srikumar was born in 1932 and educated at a boarding school at Mount Abu on the opposite flank of India. In 1946, when he was a teenager, the family moved to London. Their home was in Kensington, but Srikumar travelled across the city to attend Highgate School (which he liked much more than the Christian Brothers' school at Mount Abu). From Highgate, Srikumar Sen went to Jesus College, Oxford, to read history. Perhaps of more moment, he was an Oxford Boxing Blue. This photograph - for which I am indebted to the Vincent's Club website - is of Oxford's 1951 Boxing Blues. It's fairly easy to spot Srikumar. He married a South African artist, Eileen Hartwell. A tainee post at The Times was his entry point to a career in journalism, but in about 1954, Srikumar and Eileen moved to India and spent a decade there before returning to London. He worked for The Times - for which he was the Boxing Correspondent for sixteen years - as well as the Observer and the Guardian. Srikumar Sen's novel The Skinning Tree won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2012. He has now completed a second novel, a sequel of sorts. to which he has given the title The Nowherian. Both are drawn in large measure from his own life and experiences. The more recent novel is an account of being caught between two different cultures and not feeling truly at home in either. I took this photo of Srikumar when I called on him the other day - one of my better snaps. He's given me permission to post it.
0 Comments
It's taken a while. But the reviews are now coming in of my book, A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street (published by Reaktion Books, hardback, illustrated and really nicely produced and only £15.99!) Here's a taster: 'Through careful use of police documents, as well as reports in the contemporary Yiddish press, Whitehead renders their [Latvian anarchists'] world in vivid detail: the reader sees the cheap furniture in rented rooms lit by sputtering gas lamps, the love affairs that would sometimes blossom briefly between comrades, and the details of their shared dreams about transforming their homeland.' - TLS 'brilliantly recounts the events' - Camden New Journal '[This] well-researched and detailed book looks like being the definitive study' - Socialist Standard 'a master class in social history' - Policing and Society It's particularly wonderful to have a full, and appreciative, review in the hugely prestigious TLS (behind a subscription paywall). Here's what Josh Ireland made of the book in a piece entitled - inevitable really - 'Anarchy in the UK'. Anarchy in the UK: The story of the siege of Sidney Street By Josh Ireland May 17, 2024 A DEVILISH KIND OF COURAGE Anarchists, aliens and the siege of Sidney Street 320pp. Reaktion. £15.99. Andrew Whitehead A few days before Christmas in 1910, a gang of Latvian anarchists (nobody knows exactly how many were involved) tried to tunnel their way into a jeweller’s shop on Houndsditch in London. Had they been successful they would have escaped with a haul worth, in today’s terms, more than a million pounds – money they could have used to fund the struggle against tsarist repression back home. Instead they were interrupted after a neighbour noticed the noise they were making. When police arrived to stop them, the thieves opened fire, killing three officers and leaving two others seriously wounded. One robber was hit by one of his comrades’ bullets and died within hours. The others slipped away. On January 3, 1911, two of the criminals were tracked down to a house in Stepney, 100 Sidney Street. Aware that they were outgunned, the police on the scene appealed for help from the army, who sent Scots Guards equipped with machineguns and horse-pulled artillery (not used). A siege ensued; it went on for six hours, during which time the building caught fire. Nobody intervened. When the authorities picked through the still-hot wreckage, they found two bodies. One gunman had been shot; the other had died from smoke inhalation. This was clearly a tragedy, but it was also a spectacle exhilarating enough to draw tens of thousands of spectators and grab the attention of the young home secretary, Winston Churchill, who quickly – and many would say rashly – involved himself in proceedings. (It was Churchill who ordered that the fire brigade should not try to quench the blaze consuming the thieves’ hideout.) The incident shocked the population, who were not used to the sound of gunfire and had barely registered the existence of the foreign anarchists living among them. It remains the bloodiest day in the history of London’s police. It is also – along with the Iranian embassy siege of 1980 – the only time in history that troops have opened fire in the British capital. So perhaps it’s no surprise that even before the rubble had been cleared and the bodies carried away, the story was acquiring the dimensions of a myth. The fault line between what actually happened and what the world believed, or wanted to believe, is the focus of Andrew Whitehead’s A Devilish Kind of Courage. The author patiently explores the haphazard community of Latvian anarchists and their mingling with the other eastern European migrants in the East End. The threads he takes up lead him from Russian prison cells to the streets of Melbourne. Those most directly concerned with the Houndsditch operation – and both men and women played significant roles – were almost all members of a mysterious group known as Liesma, the Latvian word for flame. Through careful use of police documents, as well as reports in the contemporary Yiddish press, Whitehead renders their world in vivid detail: the reader sees the cheap furniture in rented rooms lit by sputtering gas lamps, the love affairs that would sometimes blossom briefly between two comrades, and the details of their shared dreams about transforming their homeland. A Devilish Kind of Courage also shows how impressions of the anarchists were shaped by the lurid coverage they received from a news media that was itself in the process of being transformed. Printing innovations allowed the sale of halfpenny daily newspapers, which attracted a new mass readership in search of sensationalist accounts. Action photographs had begun to replace artists’ sketches and newsreel cinematography meant that dramatic footage of the day’s events could be shown in cinemas in a matter of hours. The result of all this was that events could be reported more quickly and in greater detail than ever. But it also meant that myths could be created with unprecedented speed. Inaccuracies, exaggerations and outright falsehoods could swiftly appear in print (or on screen) and, once these phantasms were out in the world, it was harder than ever before to dispel them. The few anarchists unfortunate enough to be swept up by the police in the siege’s aftermath were not given the chance to correct the record. More than 100 years later, Andrew Whitehead’s book makes a strong attempt to do so on their behalf. Josh Ireland is a writer based in London. He is the author of The Traitors, 2017, and Churchill & Son, 2021 So I am well pleased with that. And there's another very positive and full review by Dan Carrier in the Camden New Journal which is of course - and you should know this - the UK weekly newspaper of the year. You want more? Well, here's a recording of the book's launch at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town - with many thanks to friend, neigbour and camera operator extraordinaire, Brian Kelly: Hackney doesn't have a lot in the way of Tudor manor houses. But happily it does have Sutton House on Homerton High Street - which dates back to 1535 and is the oldest residential building in the borough. It was built by Sir Ralph Sadleir, a courtier of Henry VIII. And it has over the years been a home, school, squat and trade union office. And as for the reference to 'Breakers' Yard' - well, until not that l0ng ago a patch of adjoining land which is now part of Sutton House was used for breaking-up cars and vans. It's now home to a community garden. Sutton House is run by the National Trust, and is open to the public on Fridays and Sundays. Get thee off to Homerton! Entrance is not free - but you won't regret the chance to see a largely unaltered Tudor home.
British universities have been slower than their counterparts across the Atlantic to set up pro-Palestine protest camps. But they are starting to catch up. On Monday morning, a group of Oxford students set up a camp on the green space outside the Natural History Museum - that's opposite Keble College. There are now a couple of dozen small tents, and a few bigger tents - one a media centre, another a library/study centre, and there's a clearing house for food and other donations in support of the protest. The mood is friendly and relaxed - the main problem is that recent heavy rain has turned part of the camp to mush, and the protestors are using planks, plastic and donated straw to stop the site becoming a Glasto-style wash-out. When I popped by on Tuesday afternoon, the sun was shining and there was a trickle of news journalists - I spotted one from The Times - taking a look around. The protestors say they don't know how long they will be sleeping out - but having taken the university authorities by surprise in striking camp, they don't seem to intend to pull up their tent pegs anytime soon.
Introducing Francisco de Miranda - a guy who liked a good scrap. If there was a bit of a bargy anywhere, he wanted a bit of the action. The American Revolutionary wars ... the French Revolutionary wars ... the independence struggles in Latin America: he fought in them all. The one place he didn't do any fighting is London. But that hasn't stopped his statue sprouting up on a corner of the very fashionable Fitzroy Square - it's on the flank wall of the Adams-designed 40 Fitzroy Square, opposite the Indian YWCA. Why here? Well, Francisco de Miranda - born in Caracas in 1750 - apparently lived for a few years nearby on Grafton Way. There are a couple plaques to him on that building too. He married a Yorkshire woman, Sarah Andrews, and this is where they lived together. But the dates given are perhaps approximate - and certainly not a period of continuous residence in this corner of Fitzrovia. Francisco de Miranda is regarded in Venezuela as a hero of the independence movement. He is known as the 'First Universal Venezuelan'. But he didn't meet the happiest of ends. He feuded with that other Latin American military legend Simon Bolivar and died in prison in the Spanish port of Cadiz in 1816 - the Spanish of course being the enemy as far as Latin American independence movements were concerned. Miranda was buried in a mass grave and his remains have never been identified. An empty tomb has been left for him in the National Pantheon of Venezuela. This statue is apparently a copy of one made in 1895 by the Venezuelan sculptor Rafael de la Cova. It was put in position here on Fitzroy Square in 1990.
The location of this statue adjoining a private property and behind railings makes it appear a private endeavour rather than a routine piece of hagiography in bronze. But why shouldn't a Venezuelan general get a look in on London's streets? By chance today, I popped into the Guildhall Art Gallery. What a delight! A wonderful range of paintings from the holdings of the Corporation of the City of London, well presented and with free admission. I was astonished to see a group portrait of the first London School Board, elected in 1870. And there on the margins is the great radical, Benjamin Lucraft (1809-1897). So I found myself face-to-face with Ben Lucraft. Quite a thrill!
He was a chair carver who was involved in the final throes of Chartism, turned to temperance, trade unionism and a vibrant tradition of artisan radicalism. He was prominent in the Reform League, campagning for an extension of the franchise. And he was an office-holder in the First International, until he resigned after disagreeing with Marx's lionising of the Paris Commune and the Communards. Lucraft was also a keen proponent of free public education, and the only working man elected to the London School Board in 1870, He was in the Lib-Lab tradition, a radical liberal more than a socialist, and twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. And here he is in a detail of the group portrait (he's on the right) and in a photograph taken in his old age. Robert Owen was a socialist, a philanthropist, a rationalist (and spiritualist), a cooperator and a textile manufacturer And yes, it is is fairly unusual for all those labels to be applied to the same person. In Kensal Green cemetery in west London, there's an obelisk-style memorial to Owen. He's not buried there - this is a public tribute to him erected in 1879, more than twenty years after his death. Alongside the Owen obelisk, and somewhat in its shadow, is the Reformers' Memorial - erected a few years later in 1885, This too is a non-funerary monument - in a burial ground but not marking a burial. It bears the names of women and men who campaigned to achieve democratic rights and freedom of the press. A few more names were added in 1907. The full list of names on the Reformers' Memorial is given here. It inc;ludes the well known - William Morris, Harriet Martineau, Francis Place. Charles Bradlaugh. Elizabeth Fry, John Ruskin - and some who are a lot more obscure, as well as honouring prominent freethinkers and several of those who campaigned tenaciously for women's suffrage. I've been able to find out very little about Joseph Corfield, who was the main organiser of the Reformers' Memorial, or about his daughter Emma Corfield, who added names almost twenty years after her father's death.
Curiously, Joseph Corfield was not himself interred at Kensal Green but in another of the 'magnificent seven' garden cemeteries around London, Abney Park in Stoke Newington. This was Cliff Richard's first home. It's a modest single-storey, four-room house in Maqbara colony at the heart of Lucknow in North India. The colony is doing quite well - many of the houses are smart and well-kept. 26 Maqbara Colony, as you can see, needs a little love. Harry Rodger Webb was born in Lucknow on 14 October 1940 - not in this house, but in the nearby King George VI Medical College. It's not entirely clear whether he was born into a British family or into one which might be regarded as Anglo-Indian, a distinct community which has both Indian and European heritage. According to the Times of India, in a 2006 article available on line, Harry's parents, Rodger and Dorothy, lived in Dehra Dun. But they moved to Lucknow for the birth because the hospital had a better reputation. They stayed in Maqbara colony in what was Rodger's father's home. Dorothy also seems to have had family links with Lucknow - her mother was apparently the dormitory matron at the city's leading girls' school, La Martiniere. While on the look-out in Maqbara colony for Cliff Richard's old home, we came across Annette (left) and Carol. Annette pointed out no. 26, and said her mum used to play with young Harry back in the day. She mentioned that Cliff's old home has new tenants - a local family have just moved in. The Maqbara colony, about thirty small houses arranged neatly around a Shia imambara and a small park in front of it, has traditionally been home to an Anglo-Indian community. Their numbers are diminishing. But we were told that to this day, quite a few of the local residents are Anglo-Indian Christians. Young Harry doesn't seem to have spent a lot of time in Lucknow. By the time he was six, the family was living in Howrah near Calcutta. And in 1948, after the trauma and bloodletting of Partition, the Webbs boarded a boat to Tilbury and remade their life in England. The Shia imambara which is the main feature of Maqbara colony and from which it gets its name is the burial place of a king of Awadh, Amjad Ali Shah. He ruled from 1842 to 1847, and built Lucknow's main street Hazratganj, which is just a stone's throw away from where he now rests. Amjad Ali Shah's son, Wajid Ali Shah, was the last king of Awadh. The piratical East India Company annexed his kingdom in 1856, and Wajid Ali Shah was exiled to Calcutta where he died thirty years later. On the Hazratganj side of the colony, there's a sumptuous Mughal-style gate which has in part been renovated and looks - from some angles - wonderfully imposing. This seems to be of the same data as the imambara. And there's this curious clash of styles and cultures as the very formal gate meshes with the more modest Anglo-Indian homes on either side. But that's the joy of this part of Lucknow!
At the college in Chennai where I teach, Sahmat - the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust - has organised an excellent exhibition 'Hum Sab Sahmat' in which writers, artists and photographers proclaim the importance of secularism and tolerance. A particularly timely venture. Safdar Hashmi was 34 when he was murdered in 1989 while performing street theatre. He was a leftist, activist and writer. Allied to the exhibition, there's a section entitled 'The Light Has Gone Out of Our Lives', about the photojournalism of Gandhi's assassination on 30 January 1948 and his cremation. It's wonderful, and is co-curated by one of India's leading photographers, Ram Rahman, a founding member of Sahmat. Among the images exhibited is the one above of a young boy at Gandhi's cremation. The boy is Gandhi's grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who celebrates his 80th birthday next year. He has had a distinguished career as a diplomat and administrator. Marvellously, Gopalkrishna Gandhi came to the exhibition to see this photo in which he features. He apparently was not aware of it until recently One of the themes of the exhibition is the professional rivalry between two of the leading news photographers of the twentieth century, both of whom happened to be in Delhi when Gandhi was killed. Margaret Bourke-White was American; Henri Cartier-Bresson was French. We are told the story of how Margaret Bourke-White infuriated Gandhi's entourage by using flash photography to capture an image of Gandhi shortly after his death. At the cremation, a third foreign photographer becomes part of the story - an American, Max Desfor. He perhaps deserves the credit for one of the most iconic images of that event. Is that Life photo Desfor's work or Cartier-Bresson's? I'll leave you to decide!
The following snippet of information could really give you the edge in your next pub quiz: Chennai is the only Indian city to have a lighthouse! It's very centrally located, at the southern end of Marina beach (reputed to be the second biggest urban beach in the world, though no one has told me what the biggest is). And Chennai's lighthouse has another national distinction - it's the only lighthouse in India to have a lift. Just as well, as there's a public viewing gallery at the top, on the ninth floor and 185 feet above the ground. And yes, you do get spectacular views. S. Muthiah, the chronicler of Madras, comments slightly acidly that the lighthouse is 'one of the newer horrors in the city'. It's a popular landmark and a well visited spot for weekend family outings. But certainly it doesn't have the distinction of the city's earlier lighthouses. The second of these lighthouses, looking a bit like a classical column, is still standing in the grounds of the High Court.
Strangely the light in the current lighthouse - I'm told - was switched off after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in Tamil Nadu in 1991 and remained extinguished for a couple of decades. So it maybe that the lighthouse is more valued by landlubbers than by seafarers. |
Andrew Whitehead's blogWelcome - read - comment - throw stones - pick up threads - and tell me how to do this better! Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|