If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen that Tammy and I spent a couple of days in Shrewsbury last week. It’s somewhere that we have been meaning to visit for years and we have finally got round to it.
Like so many people, I was attracted to the place by reading about the medieval town in Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael stories. She describes the abbey at the foot of the town and the castle at the top so well that I wanted to see them for myself. There are still bits of the abbey and the castle standing but, to be honest, not much, though both are worth a visit. We started with the castle. Apart from a tiny bit of wall at the entrance, all that is left of the medieval castle is the Great Hall built by Henry III in the 13th century.
It’s been chopped and changed a fair bit since, with an extra floor added and internal partitions put in and taken away. It was, for a while, a private residence but the 20th century saw it purchased by the Shropshire Horticultural Society who tried to restore the Great Hall to its original appearance. This included putting in not one but two minstrels’ galleries, because everybody knows that 13th century Great Halls had minstrels’ galleries. (They didn’t.) Overall, though, the building is in remarkably good shape.
As you can just about see in the photo the ground floor (where all the light is) is now a museum celebrating the history of the Shropshire regiments. It’s an unfashionably unashamed celebration of the Army with more red coats than I have seen in a while, plus some unusual exhibits like a lock of Napoleon’s hair. (A Shropshire regiment guarded him at St Helena.)
Otherwise little is left of the castle. Even the Norman motte — the artificial high point that is usually the last thing to be lost in ancient fortifications — is but a shadow of its former glory as much of it slipped into the river below back in 1271, taking with it the wooden tower on its summit. The romantic tower that you see today is a 19th century folly.
At the other end of town the abbey, too, is a shadow of the building it once was. Henry VIII’s Reformation saw the destruction of almost all the Abbey buildings and even the great abbey church itself, once 302 feet (over 90 metres) long was truncated to serve as a parish church. What remains, though is splendid. The two lower arches in this photo are original Norman. (The top storey was added later.)
The only other parts of the Abbey to survive were a pulpit which had been part of the refectory so that monks could have the gospels read to them as they ate (and which was saved as it made an attractive garden ornament for the man who bought the land to build on) and a hall for sheltering travellers. The hall features a lot in the Cadfael stories as travellers often drive the plots, so I had to photograph it, however unimpressive it looks.
The Abbey and the castle may be shadows of their former selves, but the town in between is astonishing. Built in the loop of the river there has been no room for urban sprawl or even any major redevelopment and much of the original mediaeval street system and a remarkable number of the buildings still survive. What distinguishes Shrewsbury from many other historic towns is that the ancient buildings have been pressed into use for the 21st century. So the beautiful old market hall (pictured below) contains a cinema upstairs in the late 16th century building.
The public library is housed in Shrewsbury School, which was founded in 1550. (That’s it at the top of the page.) As a school it, of course, had its own library and the idea that people are still using the building for at least part of its original purpose seems to me to demonstrate a much better understanding of “heritage” then all those buildings that we have carefully sealed away so they can be enjoyed as museums. Some of the library’s rooms are spectacular.
In Shrewsbury, most of the buildings aren’t museums unless, of course, they are the local Museum and Art Gallery, which incorporates 13th-century Vaughan’s Mansion, one of only a handful of early medieval defensive hall houses remaining in the UK and a 19th century music hall.
Besides the Norman, medieval and 17th century buildings, the town has a number of remarkable 19th century buildings. This hospital, now developed as residential apartments, stood out for me.
There was a lot to see in just two days and we took time to visit Wroxeter Roman city as well. Once the fourth largest city in Britain, it’s now basically a single wall (known as ‘The Old Works’) in a field but the archaeologists have worked their magic and the place was definitely impressive. As the Romans would have said, though, Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Old Works and the excavated site of the baths
So there we are: several decades after I first said, “We ought to visit Shrewsbury,” we did and it was very, very good. I can recommend it. We stayed in The Old Post Office, itself an amazing old building in the centre of the town. If you have a couple of days to spare, you could do a lot worse.
My beloved’s journal continues, though how long we’ll keep up these weekly posts is uncertain. It’s a difficult time to catch the mood of. On the one hand, we are enjoying long country walks with our son and his new bubble but, on the other, friends trapped abroad and older relatives cut off from everything that defines their normal lives are all struggling.And she continues (rightly as it turns out) to worry about what winter will bring.
Sunday 14 June 2020
Just as I was finishing yesterday’s entry, I got a call from Mike. His plans had changed. Why didn’t we come over for a long walk/picnic/BBQ? So I rushed home, made cream cheese bagels and dragged Tom through the shower. We were there by 1pm, to meet Mike, Morley, G and S, leaving the house, clutching an OS map.
Mike had mentioned a footpath through meadows a few minutes walk from his door, but I hadn’t believed him. This is London – within the M25. Surely, if there was open space, people would know about it? The secret was a horrible entrance – right by the A40 roundabout – which looked like a track to a fly tip. But 100 yards later, around the corner, the meadows of Middlesex opened up. Long grass, buttercups, clover, the lot, with a very excited Morley, leaping up like a little puppy. Eventually we were balancing over a lock on the Fray, admiring long boats. S was keen to make elderflower champagne, so we picked elderflowers along the towpath, and decided which boat we would buy in a possible alternative universe.
G talked about her family. Her sister is struggling with three children at home, including a teenager chaffing at the restraints. Her stepfather is still shielding and getting get fed up. How much more of the time left to him can be spent in not singing in the choir or seeing friends? S is now installed for the duration with M & G — be careful of house guests these days because once they are in they can never leave. She talked about the good old days working in adventure training for kids (obviously not happening now) and her new job in the Post Office sorting office.
At 3.30 Mike relented to Tom’s increasingly pointed remarks about lunch, and we sat on the green in Uxbridge eating his pasta salad and my bagels. And back by more streams and reed beds and ponds, looking increasingly like Wind in the Willows, with water lilies and flag irises and a terrapin sunning itself on a rock. When we returned after 5 hours and 10 miles, I didn’t want to admit how much my legs didn’t work.
We sat in the garden eating the (melted, gooey) chocolate biscuits I had brought, while Mike made pizzas to cook in his new expensive BBQ contraption. In the end we had 3 pizzas (one burnt, one underdone and one perfect) huddled under a tarpaulin Mike had fixed to the drainpipe and windowsill, while rain poured down and lightening appeared in the sky. I stayed warm under a blanket as we got closer and closer, and life felt better and better. Truly a night to remember.
Dining al fresco in the English summer
Friday 19 June 2020
After Saturday’s excitement, it’s been a quiet week. I’ve been trying to help with V with her employment problems. V has been unable to return from India, though her manager keeps looking at Sky Scanners, to find possible fights to bring her home, routed via Delhi, Dubai, Istanbul etc. Most of these are aspirations, or phantoms. Reports in the Indian press say that no commercial flights have taken off from India. There are only been repatriation flights, organised by Governments and, because V is not a UK citizen, she has been at the very bottom of the priority list.
But it is difficult to prove that they are all phantoms. Eventually V snapped that she wasn’t going to consider a flight through Delhi, with multiple stopovers, taking up to 44 hours and liable to dump her in random airports. The risk was too great.
The manager pointed to V’s official risk assessment, which put her in the “low risk” category. The NHS (her employer) required her to consider alternative routes. And if she was not considering these (probably non-existent) alternatives, her pay would be stopped. V has now booked a place on an Air India repatriation flight and is due back next week. She faces a three-person panel to consider recouping her pay for April and May, even though she has been working from India.
Low risk? V is older than she looks. If the latest research is true, as someone with a South Asian background she has an equivalent Covid risk profile as a white woman in her eighties. How can an NHS trust assess her as low risk? I’ve been practising my employment lawyer skills and trying to write “reasonable and not really legalistic” emails on her behalf.
I stopped work at 4pm on Wednesday to wander into Richmond to re-engage with the shopping experience. There were a lot of sales, at huge discounts, for products that no-one wants any more. No worry about queues outside – the places were empty. I wandered into H&M, which had a few people, and bought a black T shirt for £5. Was this the T shirt that would make me look slim and beautiful? When I got home and tried it on, I realised it wasn’t, but it hardly seems worth the hassle of taking it back. I’ve now got the urge to splurge out of my system.
I’m now working on the basis that coronavirus goes away in the summer when everyone is outside. I shall spend the next three months having as much fun as possible. The second wave seems scheduled for October. In November, we will all be back indoors, cowering, as the economy collapses.
Last week I outlined the historical background to the siege of Cawnpore, as described in the second of my John Williamson novels, Cawnpore. The siege ran from 6th to 25th June 1857, so last Monday was the 165th anniversary of its start.
General Wheeler, the officer commanding the small European garrison, was, as I explained last week, convinced that the uprising among native troops would not extend to those in Cawnpore. However, he took some precautions, preparing what he called an Entrenchment in which civilians could shelter in the event of a rising.
The Entrenchment was an area of open ground of around 9 acres (3.6 hectares) which contained two barrack buildings. One was about 50 feet (about 15 metres) wide and 190 feet (60m) long, the other 60 (20m) feet wide and over 350 feet (100m) long. In addition there were some outhouses, a kitchen, a warehouse and a row of huts. The whole thing was surrounded by a shallow ditch and a rampart made from earth dug from the ditch. This was not a militarily defensible position, and was intended just as a temporary refuge while the problems with the local Indian population died down.
On 5 June 1857 the troops at Cawnpore mutinied. The Europeans were left alone in the Entrenchment while mutineers burned their houses in town before setting off to join the main rebel force in Delhi. For a few hours it looked as if General Wheeler had made the right call and the Entrenchment had served its purpose. The next day, though, the rebels changed their plans and returned to Cawnpore to lay siege to the Europeans.
Nobody is sure how many rebels there were. Certainly their numbers ran into thousands. Some were actual mutineers, and thus trained troops, including cavalry. Others were local Indian troops loyal to local leaders, in particular the Peshwa, Nana Sahib. General Wheeler, on the other hand, commanded around 60 European artillerymen with 6 guns, 84 infantrymen and about 200 unattached officers and civilians and 40 musicians from the native regiments. In addition, he had 70 invalids who were convalescing in the barrack hospital and around 375 women and children.
Wheeler held out from 6th to 25th June under constant artillery fire, resisting attacks by infantry and cavalry forces. The scale of the bombardment is clear in these photographs of the two large buildings, taken after the siege.
In the end, Wheeler was persuaded to surrender on the grounds that it was the only way to save the women and children trapped with him. Nana Sahib promised Wheeler’s forces safe conduct, but reneged on the promise. Only four men survived the subsequent massacre.
Accounts both then and now tend to concentrate on the massacre. The achievement of the British forces in holding a completely inadequate position against overwhelming forces for so long is often neglected. Details of the defence are harrowing. For example, the well was out in the open and water had to be drawn from it under fire. Water was therefore drawn at night, but the enemy would wait for the sound of the bucket being raised and then fire blind to where they knew the well to be. Despite the appalling danger, there were always volunteers for this task. Similarly, the cannon were always manned, although the inadequate height of the breastworks meant that the people firing them were exposed to enemy fire throughout. Despite constant casualties, the artillery fire was kept up.
Modern attitudes toward the memsahibs of 1850s India suggest, with some justification, that their attitudes and behaviour were often not particularly admirable, but the women took their positions alongside the men, reloading muskets in order to enable the soldiers to keep up a faster rate of fire when they were under attack. Women who had been used to a life of indolence, surrounded by servants, found themselves packed together in wholly inadequate accommodation with very limited sanitation, watching their children dying before their eyes. It is amazing that they continued to record phlegmatically what was happening to them. One of them left a poignant record of the fate of her family:
Entered the barracks May 31st
Cavalry left June 5th
First shot fired June 6th
Aunt Lilly died June 17th
Uncle Willy died June 18th
Left Barracks June 27th
George died June 27th
Alice died July 9th
Mam died July 12th
The writer, Caroline Lindsay, was killed with her sister, Fanny, when the women and children who had survived the initial massacre were all murdered on 15 July. The list of deaths was found in the room where they died.
The story of the insurrection that we call the Mutiny is full of deeds of great valour as well as of great cruelty on both sides. Today, though, I would like to remember the heroism of the defenders rather than dwelling (as most accounts do) on the horror of the massacre that concluded the siege.
Further reading and photo credits
If you want to know more about the events of 1857 at Cawnpore, the definitive modern account is Andrew Ward’s excellent Our Bones Are Scattered (John Murray, 1996).
The engraving is a contemporary propaganda image.
The photos were taken in 1858 by Felice Beato. They are held by the Paul J Getty Museum whose generosity in making them freely available is acknowledged.
A version of this post appeared on my blog last November, but I felt that the anniversary of the siege was a good reason for publishing it again.
Cawnpore
Cawnpore is my favourite of all the books I’ve written. It provides a detailed account of the events leading up to the siege, the military action, and the subsequent massacres viewed from both sides. Until recently, Cawnpore was usually presented as illustrating the bravery of the British forces and the cruelty of the Indians. Nowadays it is as likely to be put forward as an example of the way in which the Indians rose in a struggle for independence against a rapacious invader. In fact, the situation was more nuanced than either interpretation suggests. My book tries to reflect the moral ambiguities on both sides of the battle as well as providing a gripping, if depressing, read. It’s available on Amazon in both paperback and e-book versions. Go to mybook.to/Cawnpore.
Every Thursday I post an excerpt from my wife’s journal written two years earlier. Two years ago this week, there were signs of life returning to normal, but also intense nervousness amongst those who thought it was too soon. The Second Wave was just a vague hypothesis for most people. My beloved’s conclusion at the end of this week’s entry was to prove prescient but, of course, we didn’t know that at the time.
Friday 12 June 2020
I’m sat at the tables in York House Gardens with a take-away flat white, pretending it’s a real café. The coffee is not a self-indulgence: it’s doing my bit for economic revival. Shop staff are working on their displays, ready to open. They gather in intense discussions about social distancing.
Just overheard in Iceland. “It’s my first time out for 12 weeks”. “Is it how you remember it?” “No. it’s all closed”. Bloody hell – 12 whole weeks of not leaving the house??
Mike had been sceptical about my plans to cycle to the Albert Memorial to see D. (“You realise that cycling in central London is one of the most dangerous things you can do, right?”). But it worked just fine: 58 minutes there and 54 minutes back. I went over Putney Bridge and along the King’s Road, a compromise between Google’s two offers of the Great West Road (too scary) and back roads (too slow).
D talked a lot about her family and her garden: important stuff. And about feeling guilty for not writing: “All this empty time and nothing to show for it.” But what do any of us have to show for our lives except healthy and happy kids and (if we are lucky) memories of a beautiful garden? We spent a long time admiring the Albert Memorial, especially the four continents – elephant, camel, bison and cow (though the cow is a bit sad). “It’s part cliche and part creativity,” D remarked. I’ve had mixed feelings about the Albert Memorial over the years: Victorian monstrosity – waste of restoration cash – central landmark – and part of the furniture of my life, after years of street hockey and skater picnics and speed skate courses. I felt a sudden rush of love for the thing, warts and all, as part of our history and lives and heritage.
My aim was to get home before rush hour. I planned to be away at 3.30, and left at 3.40, which was not quite quick enough for London traffic these days. Putney Bridge was three lanes of congested cars, with more cycles, motorbikes and e-scooters weaving in and out than I have ever seen before. Is this the future?
Lockdown is always a roller-coaster, and Tom has been going through a bad patch. A few overcast and drizzly days, coupled with an assault on 19th century history. Tom has written about the White Rajah, and the Indian Mutiny and General Havelock – all pretty much banned terms. There is discussion about renaming Havelock Street.
Saturday 13 June
The sun is out, which makes such a difference these days. We bounce from optimism in the sun to gloom in the drizzle. Right now, Richmond Riverside is picture postcard perfect, with paddle boarders out in force. You have to be optimistic to trust such a precarious contraption. Tom’s rights issues are resolved and Burke in the Land of Silver is on Amazon, ready for pre-order. Tom switched from existential despair to happy and productive with a single email.
But we still can’t trust our Government. I realise, re-reading my diaries, that by 28 February, Covid was front of mind. But I still did what the Government told me, which was to carry as normal. I went to the theatre and milongas and cafes and restaurants and took long journeys by train. We now know this was a mistake. I personally might have been part of a chain of causation that caused someone’s death. This time around, should I be more cautious than the Government? Perhaps, if things get bad, but … but. London is looking good right now and maybe it can’t spread outside in the summer.
With all this spinning around in my brain, I spend too long checking figures. By the time problems show up in the death figures, it’s too late. And you can’t trust testing figures. The most reliable figures are hospital admissions, which are going down overall, but overall won’t do. And local figures aren’t available. Last week a Minister flashed a clip of what appeared to be local graphs on The Daily Numbers, which were too small to see. But when I looked them up, they weren’t hospital admissions: they were people in hospital, which isn’t the same thing. The radio talks about R, which is a bit too close to 1 for comfort. Apparently, the latest Government idea is to stop worrying about R, and to rely on whatever stats the Test and Track scheme throw at us. We’re fucked.
This is the time of year when my thoughts turn to Cawnpore and the events of 1857.
Although the British had been establishing themselves in India for some time before 1757, the battle of Plassey is often seen as a turning point, marking the beginning of British rule in the country. This was certainly a view shared by many Indians and the idea had grown up among some but British rule would last for 100 years, ending in the summer of 1857.
In the early years of British rule, colonial officers were surprisingly well assimilated into Indian society. Many took Indian wives. In some cases these were little more than mistresses, but a lot of officers formed Indian households and raised children in the country. There was genuine interest in the local customs and religions, which were generally respected. Many parts of India were ruled by people who were not originally from that area and the change from an Indian overlord who had conquered their region to a European one meant little to the locals. Over time, though, the nature of British rule changed. European women travelled out to India in search of potential husbands and the custom of taking native wives was frowned upon. The Church saw India as fertile ground for new converts and preachers arrive who denounced local customs and religions. The country was flooded with new officials who saw a job in India as a way to make a fortune and who were little interested in the culture of the country, often despising the natives and their beliefs.
By the mid-19th century, many Indians were fractious and resentful of the British. Yet at the same time the British were so confident of their apparently inalienable right to rule that the majority of the soldiers employed to maintain British power in the sub-continent were, in fact, Indians. Furthermore, Indian troops were seeing a reduction in the respect and privileges that used to be accorded to them in the earlier years of British rule.
Throughout the spring of 1857 there were indications of growing Indian discontent and calls for revolt, yet when the first Europeans were killed by mutinying Indian soldiers – in Meerut on 10 May 1857 – it seems to have taken the authorities by surprise.
“The Sepoy revolt at Meerut,” from the Illustrated London News, 1857
Once the mutiny had started it spread rapidly from regiment to regiment. The revolt spread to the civil population too, taking on the character of a general uprising, though some Indians never turned against the British and those who did were riven by factional in-fighting.
Soon much of north-west India was rising against the British, but many of the Europeans stationed in India struggled to believe that it was really happening. Officers often implored their troops to stay loyal. Some troops did, others shot their commanders down. In Cawnpore (now Kanpur), a town about 250 miles from Meerut the local British commander, General Wheeler, did not expect any trouble even after news of the Mutiny reached the town. His military force was negligible and the local ruler was thought to be sympathetic to the British.
In the event, Wheeler (himself married to an Indian) proved horribly mistaken. The siege of the British at Cawnpore and the massacre that ended it was one of the darkest single incidents of 1857.
This is the background to the second of the John Williamson stories, Cawnpore. Cawnpore is set during a particularly vicious war, but it is not a war story. The book centres on John Williamson, the narrator of The White Rajah. (The story stands alone and you don’t need to read The White Rajah first.) His life in the Far East has left him more comfortable with the princelings of the local Indian court than with the class-ridden Europeans he works with. He has friends on both sides of the conflict and struggles to stay true to them all. In the midst of a war that is fought with terrible ruthlessness, he tries to remain a decent person.
Cawnpore is a story about idealism and reality; about belonging and exclusion. It looks at the British colonial project and how it went so horribly wrong. It makes most people cry.
At the time that I wrote it, my son was serving in Afghanistan, in a conflict that can trace its origins back to the 1850s and before. Yet again, British troops were fighting and dying for a way of life they didn’t understand. Researching Cawnpore made me realise that the important thing about the war in Afghanistan wasn’t that it was right or that it was wrong: it was that it was futile.
Cawnporeis my favourite of all the books I’ve written. I do hope you read it.
