Empire’s Children: Trace Your Family History Across the World

In early September 1781 the French defeated the British in a naval battle at Chesapeake, cutting off supplies to Lord Cornwallis’s land forces. Seizing the opportunity, Washington moved his army from New York and besieged Cornwallis at Yorktown. Cornwallis, the vanquisher of Tipu Sultan, but never a supporter of the taxes imposed by Westminster on the Americans, surrendered in October.

The war went on, but effectively it was over. Political support for the war crashed after the defeat, Lord North, the Prime Minister, resigned, and in April Parliament voted to cease hostilities. Although the articles of peace were not formally signed until the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the war was over. The British left the few Indian allies they had in the lurch, signing over their lands, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, to the newly formed United States of America; and settled down to an amenable trade relationship with their new ally, soon finding that having the North Americans as partners was far more profitable than having to fund them as colonists.

The British were not the only ones to treat badly those for whom they had implicitly taken responsibility. This chapter should not close without telling the story of Toussaint Louverture.

In the wake of the French Revolution, in 1792, the new National Assembly declared that all blacks and mulattos in France and its colonies should have the same political rights as the whites. This did not please the rich sugar-planters of places like Saint-Domingue, who had already decided that the island would be better off if it left France and joined Britain. This proposal pleased Britain, but there had to be some very delicate and secret diplomatic negotiation to make sure she got what she wanted. The French revolutionaries were touchy and belligerent, and had to be handled with care. But the British were pleased to be able to pay back the French in a small way for the aid they had given to the Americans a few years earlier, and glad of the extra sugar revenue, so they garrisoned Saint-Domingue. The troops were soon succumbing to tropical disease and fearful boredom.

Nobody considered that the slaves of the island might play a role themselves, and when in 1794 the French government declared that all slaves should be free, they rose against the British under Louverture, a freeman and former coachman who was already a revolutionary leader, and kicked them out. By 1798, at the age of fifty-two, Louverture was effective ruler of the island, though he remained passionately attached to France and to the ideals of its revolution. However, times were changing in the mother country. Late in 1799, modern Europe’s first major dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, effectively took over the country which he was, through the next fifteen years, to sacrifice on the altar of his own ambition.

A NEW EXTENSION TO THE EMPIRE PRESENTED ITSELF, JUST AS ANOTHER PART WAS FALLING AWAY.

In Saint-Domingue, Louverture drafted a constitution that made him governor general for life with near absolute powers. There was no provision for a French official, because Louverture thought himself Frenchman enough. Bonaparte appeared to accept Louverture’s professions of loyalty, and confirmed his appointment, but in fact he wanted to make Saint-Domingue a profitable colony, and to reinstate slavery to do so.

Bonaparte was conveniently forgetting that, had it not been for Louverture, Saint-Domingue would no longer have belonged to France in the first place.

The French dictator then sent a task force under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, to regain control of the island. Leclerc landed in January and immediately moved against Louverture. The battle raged for several months, but some of Louverture’s brigades defected, as did former allies on the island, and defeat loomed. On 7 May 1802, Louverture signed a treaty with the French, on condition that there would be no return to slavery, and retired to his farm, but three weeks later, on the pretext that he was plotting an uprising, Leclerc seized Louverture, put him on board a warship, and sent him to France. On the deck of the ship the Governor General declared: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in St-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots, for they are numerous and deep.’

Louverture reached France two months later. In August, he was sent to a castle high up in the Alps, a cold and bleak place deliberately chosen for its qualities, where he was put on a starvation diet and subjected to lengthy interrogations. ‘On 27 April 1803 he was found sitting by the fireplace, his hands resting on his knees, his head slightly bent, dead. According to one account, the rats had gnawed at his feet. He was thrown into a common grave.’

There is also a footnote to this chapter. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, Britain no longer had anywhere to transport its convicts and other undesirables, though immigration to the United States still boomed as the burgeoning new country needed peopling as it ploughed westwards, sweeping, as is the way of all colonizers, the local residents aside. Fortunately for Britain, in 1770 Captain James Cook, whom we met briefly at the side of Major General Wolfe before the battle for Quebec, reached the south-eastern shores of Australia, deftly assisted in his navigation to those parts of the world by John Harrison’s recently invented chronometer, an instrument which for the first time allowed mariners to fix the lines of longitude. He was not the first European to enter these waters, nor even the first Englishman, for the pirate-turned-explorer and naturalist William Dampier, the first man to circumnavigate the globe twice, had arrived on the north-west coast over seventy years earlier. But Dampier had hit infertile and forbidding shores, was regarded with mistrust by the Establishment, and anyway Britain was quite happy as it was with America in 1699.

But Botany Bay was fertile and inviting. A new extension to the Empire presented itself, just as another part was falling away. Cook was the hero of the hour.

DIANA RIGG INDIA

Dame Diana Rigg is one of Britain’s best-loved actresses. She is perhaps best known for her iconic role as ‘Mrs Peel’ in the hit television spy series The Avengers.

She also starred as Tracy Di Vincenzo, the only woman James Bond ever married, in the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In a career that spans nearly fifty years, she has become a star of stage and screen, and has won both an Emmy and a Bafta for her performances. She is also a published author. One book, No Turn Unstoned, was inspired by a particularly unkind critic and is a compilation of the worst theatrical reviews. The other is a compilation of poetry on the English countryside entitled So to the Land. In addition to acting and writing, Diana is also Chancellor of Stirling University and is well known for her charity work. In 1988 she was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) and in 1994 she was made a Dame Commander. As part of her journey into the history of the British Empire, Diana reflected on the symbolism of these accolades. What exactly is she ‘Dame’ of?

Diana was born in India in 1938 but, before embarking on the programme, she knew very little about how she came to spend the early years of her childhood in India. She remembers leading a priviledged lifestyle, with several servants. She admits questioning her mother later on in life about the morality of this sort of lifestyle, but as her mother said, ‘that’s just the way things were then’. Diana started by visiting her brother Hugh to collect some photographs and letters that her mother wrote during the family’s time there. Hugh remembers the food – goat’s milk and lots of brain! But both Diana and her brother admit that theirs was a generation who didn’t question their parents’ actions and decisions. Diana needed to go back to a time before she was born, to find out why her father went to India in the first place.

Louis Rigg, Diana’s father, was born in Doncaster in 1903. He followed in the footsteps of his father, who was also a railway engineer. Diana went to see historian John Scott Morgan at the National Railway Museum. Records show that Louis’s father had spent £100 (nearly six months’ wages in those days) on securing him a premium apprenticeship with the designer of the Flying Scotsman, Nigel Gresley. Such an impressive placement would normally have guaranteed him a job, but just as he was completing it in 1922 the government made the decision to rationalize the number of railway franchises from 122 to just four. Louis decided to look elsewhere for opportunities, to the British Empire. In 1925 he answered an advertisement in The Times, calling for railway engineers to work in India.

India, like many of the colonies, appealed to the British working classes because it offered the sort of lifestyle that someone like Louis could never have enjoyed in Britain. But the change in environment and culture was vast, and many Britons found it difficult to adjust. Once in India, Diana’s first destination was the city of Bikaner on the edge of the Thar Desert, Louis’s first posting. Travelling on the railway that her father helped build, she can see symbols of the imperial legacy everywhere. Railways were built by the British all over the Empire, and were of vital importance to the infrastructure of the region. They are also one of the most important legacies of the Raj. Today 8,000 trains carry 12 million passengers daily over 75,000 kilometres of track.

As a young, unmarried man, James worked at ‘the end of the line’ where conditions were tough. The front of the track construction was far away from civilization. Temperatures rose as high as 50 °C and the jungle harboured deadly wildlife. Diseases such as typhoid and cholera were also rife. Unusually, Louis did not work for a British employer, but for the Indian Maharajah (King) of Bikaner, Ganga Singh. Bikaner was one of the 500 princely states that was still ruled by its own king rather than directly by the British. In return for swearing allegiance to the crown the Maharajahs were allowed to continue raising taxes and governing all the internal affairs of their states. Ganga Singh was an extraordinary character. His feared camel corps fought in both world wars and, as ADC to King George V, he was present at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Far from the stereotypical decadent raja who spent his time kowtowing to the British, he was a benevolent despot who not only built railways and canals to bring water to his desert state but also made education free for all his subjects.

In Bikaner, Diana went to meet Shri Lal Nathamal Joshi, who worked with Louis on the railway. Many of the newly arrived ‘sahibs’ quickly developed a reputation for high-handed treatment of their staff but it seems Louis broke this mould. Diana learned that her father is fondly remembered as a man who, far from lording it over the locals, worked with them as equals. His contribution to the local area is remembered with gratitude and appreciation. When Louis left Bikaner in 1943, all the staff gathered together to bid him farewell and Joshi wrote a special poem in honour of the occasion.

By 1929, four years after moving to India, Louis decided it was time to get married. He was given six months’ leave and returned home to Britain to seek his bride. He met twenty-one year-old Beryl Halliwell at the local Doncaster tennis club, and it was love at first sight. They were engaged almost immediately, but it took almost three years before Louis was able to persuade Beryl to make the six-week voyage to India. The couple were married in Bombay. Diana visited their first house, where she grew up, speculating how her mother would have tried to make it look as English as possible. She discovered from reading letters that her mother wrote home, that they were blissfully happy on their honeymoon.

Life for a newly arrived bride in imperial India could be socially daunting. Beryl, the small-town girl from provincial England, had five servants to carry out every household task, and the comfortable bungalow the couple lived in was a far cry from Doncaster. Beryl faced other challenges, socializing with the most senior officials of the British Empire as well as Indian royalty. Diana visited one of the maharajah’s private residences, where her parents would have been entertained, and was able to marvel at the opulence and luxury that they must have enjoyed. The Indian women were not so lucky. They were forbidden to socialize with men and were kept in ‘purdah’, only allowed to gaze down at the parties from balconies above.

THE RIGG FAMILY WERE ALSO REGULAR GUESTS AT THE MAHARAJAH’S LAKESIDE HUNTING LODGE AT GAJNER, ABOUT THIRTY MILES WEST OF BIKANER.

The Rigg family were also regular guests at the Maharajah’s lakeside hunting lodge at Gajner, about thirty miles west of Bikaner, another place that Diana visited. Louis’s rank in the social order became apparent at such gatherings. One of Beryl’s letters home provides a vivid description of one such hunt:

We didn’t go into the butts with the men, I wanted to but H.H. [His Highness]said it was too hot for us, so we watched from the lakeside An aide de camp or someone fired the first shot. That was to make the birds rise from the lake. It was extraordinary the way they all rose in a cloud when that shot was fired. Then H.H. fired the first one after the birds had risen, then all the men started. There were about 10 men shooting and they got 570 birds… H.H. himself got 170 birds but then he had 3 guns and 3 loaders so all he had to do was shoot…

Despite being a crack shot Louis, whose social status consigned him to a position at the end of the firing line, only bagged 3 birds that day.

When Diana was born in 1938, her brother Hugh was already four years old. Their mother kept a strict eye on them, making sure they did not stay in the sun too long and that they avoided local food. She was right to be cautious. Mortality among expats was high, and still higher in the local population. Even so, the imported tinned food from England was, Diana remembered, ‘disgusting!’

In 1943 the Rigg family moved to the neighbouring state of Jodhpur. Louis Rigg accepted the post of Chief Mechanical Engineer – the highest posting he could ever hope for – to the Maharajah of Jodhpur. He was now in charge of some 3,000 staff and more than 100 locomotives. The equivalent position in Britain usually attracted a knighthood. The family’s new home was commensurately grand, so large that today it is divided into four family flats. Maharajah Umaid Singh was another dynamic personality, a keen aviator who had opened the first airport in Rajasthan. He also had a 347-room palace built, still the largest private residence in the world.

Unfortunately, the good fortune did not last long. In 1944 Gandhi was released after being imprisoned for establishing the Quit India campaign in 1942. A year later the Second World War ended and pressure for independence was growing. Isolated bomb attacks began to occur, especially focused on disrupting the infrastructure, particularly the railways. Many expats believed that the time had come for them to leave. Louis Rigg took this view in August 1945 when he sent his family home on the SS Mahonada.

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