Calcutta (9 page)

But tainted he was, and goaded he still was, and he was to remain so long after he and Francis had fought their duel. By the time enmity had reached that stage both Monson and Clavering were in their graves but Francis was still
single-minded
in his pursuit of prey and prize. The calumnies
continued
on their way to London; the Governor-General was now glorying in General Burgoyne’s surrender in America, he was preparing a retreat in Switzerland, he was totally incompetent in directing a war against the Mahrattas near the Malabar coast. In the end Hastings turned on his tormentor, determined to destroy him morally by exposing his dishonour if possible, willing to obliterate him physically if that failed.
Characteristically
, he laid his plans with care. He sat down and wrote a minute he proposed to put before a Council which was now less weighted against him, though with Barwell soon to leave India anything might shortly happen; indeed, at any time a ship might sail in from London bearing both the warrant that was to depose him and
the new favourite who was to succeed. It was a long and
provocative
document but the essence of it went as follows: ‘My authority for the opinions I have declared concerning Mr
Francis
depends on facts which have passed within my own
knowledge
. I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found to be void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge, but temperately and deliberately made, from the firm persuasion that I owe this justice to the public and myself as the only redress to both, for artifices of which I have been a victim, and which threaten to involve their interests with disgrace and ruin. The only redress for a fraud for which the law has made no provision is the exposure of it.’ Then he packed Marian Hastings out of town, to stay with the Dutch Governor at Chinsurah. And he waited six weeks until Philip Francis had got over a bad bout of fever. On 14 August 1780, he had a copy of the minute sent round to Francis’s house, with a note to say that the original would be on the Council’s table the next day.

They met at six in the morning on the road to Alipore, by a double row of trees that had once been a walk of Belvedere Garden. Colonel Watson, the Chief Engineer at Fort William, was already there with Francis when Hastings arrived with Colonel Pearse, the Commandant of Artillery (the one with a Begum wife and a half-caste son at Harrow). Colonel Pearse thought the place very improper for the business, so near to the road and the hour close to riding time when horsemen and women might soon be passing by. So they walked some distance towards Mr Barwell’s house, and found a retired and dry spot. Colonel Pearse discovered that both gentlemen seemed
unacquainted
with the procedure on these occasions (as they were; Francis had never fired a pistol in his life and Hastings only once or twice) and took the liberty to tell them that if they would decide on their distance, he and Colonel Watson would measure it out. Watson suggested fourteen paces, which Hastings thought rather a lot, but didn’t object, so it was done. The gentlemen next had to be told where to stand and when to fire. Then Francis had some trouble with his priming, coming thrice to the present and down again, until it was discovered that his powder
was damp. Neither he nor Hastings had brought enough for more than one shot, but provident Colonel Pearse had a spare cartridge and supplied his man’s adversary with dry powder from that. And at last they were, after a fashion, ready to kill each other.

They presented together and Francis fired first but missed. Colonel Pearse said afterwards that it would have been possible to count three before Hastings pulled his trigger. He fired, Francis sat down with a bump and a cry that he was a dead man. Hastings shouted ‘Good God, I hope not’ and ran up to him. Francis, in fact, had the ball in his side and was bleeding heavily. Pearse and Hastings wrapped a sheet round the wound while Watson dashed for a palanquin from Belvedere, to carry him into town. That evening Hastings sent a message to Francis, asking him if he might call on the convalescent. Two days later, Francis declined ‘as civilly as possible’ through Colonel Watson, while Hastings was writing to a friend that he hoped ‘Mr
Francis
does not think of assuming any merit from this silly affair’. Both had behaved like English gentlemen of the period for half an hour or so, while conducting a deadly business which
deceptively
reads like a piece of comic opera. But within a month Francis was back in Council and the deep hostility between the two continued.

*

Even if Job Charnock had duelled with Captain Hamilton, it is doubtful whether we should have known so completely what went on. But from the time of Warren Hastings onwards we begin to form detailed pictures of Calcutta. The age of
Charnock
and his immediate successors is a period of small and
indistinct
cameos because men were then too busy hacking at the jungle for existence and profit to sit down and describe for posterity the minutiae of their lives, which in any case were probably emptier than we care to think. So we get the bare bones of history and little else. Even at the time of the Black Hole there is not much reporting of social trivia from Bengal; the chronicles, such as they are, are all of trade and campaigns and crucial events. But from the last quarter of the eighteenth century we find ourselves deeper and deeper in a mass of social
literature which becomes more and more comprehensive as the eighteenth century slides into the nineteenth.

It is partly because newspapers begin to appear with the first number of the
Bengal
Gazette
in 1780. It is partly because ladies have started to arrive with much time on their hands and large diaries to fill; parting gifts from England, no doubt. First it is Mrs Kindersley, then it is Mrs Fay, later it will be Emma Roberts and later still the Hon. Emily Eden. But it is also because there are now men in Calcutta who can apply a pen to words as well as to columns of figures, who can absorb what is happening around them while waiting for the fortune to grow; who can occasionally perform both feats as well as some professional task and remain remarkably indifferent to the possibility of a fortune. It is the age of, among others less vivid, William Hickey – attorney, dapper man about town, occasional painter and diarist extraordinary – who can both introduce the New Cutch Club to a new drink (burnt champagne) and maliciously but indelibly say all that needs to be said about an Army chaplain, Mr Blunt, in one sentence. This incomprehensible young man got abominably drunk, and in that disgraceful condition
exposed
himself to both soldiers and sailors, running out stark naked into the midst of them, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and
indecent
songs, so as to render himself a common laughing stock.’ Perhaps poor incomprehensible Mr Blunt had just been
celebrating
the recent rise in the salary of Bengal clergy, from Rs 800 to Rs 1200 (when 10 rupees were worth one sovereign). Or maybe he had landed some other windfall, for parsons dabbled in trade like everyone else. Officially they had leave to send up to
£
1,000 a year to England through the Company’s bills, but some did very much better than that. Mr Parry had a two thirds share in a salt, betel and tobacco cartel which yielded him a profit of
£
2,800 in the first year of trading and over
£
2,200 in the next.

We must beware of an error that too frequently overtakes us when we consider Victorian England, of assuming that
everyone
is living at the same presentably high standard as the
popular
stereotype; there would be comparatively poor Europeans
here, too, sweating it out in barracks and ship as well as in the Writers Building. We hear nothing of them. We hear only of households like that of Mrs Fay, barrister’s wife and
dressmaker
, who first came to Calcutta in 1780 and returned three times to die there in 1815. One of her early letters home describes their eating habits. ‘We dine at 2 o’clock in the very heat of the day. I will give you our bill of fare and the general price of things. A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, excellent Madeira (that is very expensive but eatables are very cheap). A whole sheep cost but Rs 2, a lamb R 1, six good fowls or ducks ditto, 12 pounds of bread ditto, 2 pounds butter ditto, good cheese two months old sold at the enormous price of Rs 2 or 3 per pound, but now you may buy it for R 1½. English claret sells at this time for Rs 60 a dozen.’ She might have added that you could also obtain best Durham
mustard
(Rs 2 per lb), pickled oysters (Rs 8 a bottle) or marmalade (Rs 12 per jar) through H. Davies of Tank Square. And by the time Mrs Fay died, soda water was coming in from Messrs Schweppes.

These were trenchermen, and every June the newspapers had to warn them against overeating in the desperate weather ahead, if they didn’t want to follow the surgeon of an Indiaman who had dropped dead after consuming a hearty meal of beef with the thermometer at 98 degrees. They were also powerful drinkers. A man would easily tipple three bottles of loll shrub (claret) or two of white wine at dinner and even ladies put back a bottle a day (‘fashionably or medicinally’ as Mrs Fay delicately has it). They did their best to keep the climate at bay. Every family had its ab-dar, the servant whose duty was to stay up all night,
constantly
moving an earthenware jar of water in a larger receptacle containing saltpetre and water, which produced something nearly as cold as ice by morning; the real thing did not arrive until the enterprising Frederic Tudor cut enormous blocks off frozen Wenham Lake in Massachusetts and in 1933 sailed them to Calcutta for storage in the domed Ice House on Bankshall Street. They also had the punkah, usually at mealtimes only, which had probably been introduced by the Portuguese. But the climate
generally won in the end, one way or another, if people stayed too long. It often enough took them in a roundabout way when they had barely settled down, as it did Rose Aylmer, who died at the age of twenty after ‘a most severe bowel complaint brought on entirely by indulging too much with that mischievous and dangerous fruit, the pineapple’. A memorable death, nonetheless, for it inspired one of Charles Lamb’s favourite poems, written by Walter Savage Landor, who had fallen in love with young Rose during an intoxicating hour in the Swansea Circulating Library before her parents took her East.

The climate made them go carefully with their office hours; from nine to noon in the hot season and again from seven to nine, from ten till two and from seven to nine in the rest of the year. They would have gone riding or walking before they started work, of course, and until 1818 all the horse races in
Calcutta
were run before sunrise. When evening came they could pretty well take their pick of amusement. A drive usually came first, in a variety of carriages, along the Course, which ran south from the Esplanade by the Maidan. Once a week there would be a public evening mounted by three or four of the most prominent ladies of the city, a conversation party which started at ten o’clock or even later and offered a couple of hours’ babble with cold supper before going home. There would be subscription assembly balls at the London Tavern in Vansittart Row, and it was said that many Englishwomen died of consumption brought on by the excessive strain of dancing through the night. There were endless card tables, offering ombre or quadrille but mostly whist; Lady Anne Monson was a very superior whist player. There was magnificent and desperate gambling, with Philip Francis calculating that on one blessed day in the year of our Lord he had cleaned up
£
20,000 at whist. There was boating on the Hooghly in the cool evening breeze, when parties would take to a budgerow or a mourpunkhy, a snake boat which was eight feet wide and sometimes one hundred feet long, paddled by thirty or forty men; but the most dazzling craft of all was William Hickey’s 48-footer, manned by a crew of fourteen rigged in white linen jackets and trousers with red and green turbans and
cummerbunds
.

The cultivated, who were trying to keep up with their Sterne and their Richardson, could also enjoy their theatre. The city’s first one had been demolished when Calcutta was sacked by Siraj-ud-Daula, but a replacement had been built in 1772 and the New Playhouse followed three years later. David Garrick had a hand in promoting the first and supervised the despatch of scenery for the second, and the grateful local patrons sent him two pipes of Madeira for his kind interest. Then they watched
The
Critic
or
Venice
Preserved
or Shakespeare from a seat in the pit at Rs 12 or a bench in the gallery at Rs 6; or they went along to see what Mrs Bristow, that enthusiastic amateur, was offering in the private theatre at her house on Chowringhee; and Mr Playdell’s fine voice was much in demand for his tonic
rendering
of
Let
me
approach
my
sleeping
love.
Calcutta left it to the Russian adventurer Herassim Lebedeff, though, to produce the first Bengali plays at Lebedeff’s Theatre in 1795.

This was, overwhelmingly, a masculine society. There were more women in Calcutta than in any other British settlement, to be sure, and many a girl came in high hope of a husband; if she got someone in the growing civil service, after all, it meant an assured income of
£
300 and a pension when he died; and she wouldn’t need to wet nurse any babies, for the climate was an excellent excuse to farm an infant to an ayah. So the young spinsters arrived and Sunday morning on the church steps
became
a great time and place for casting an eye over the latest boatload of beauties. And before long they were making their first tentative acquaintance, with the hookah, inviting a gentleman of their choice to share the mouthpiece for a refreshing puff, whereupon the man knew that he was at least in with a chance. Or they might dabble with a pinch of his prime Macouba, for Calcutta was a great place for taking snuff. They would
patronize
the two Frenchmen who settled into the community as fashionable hairdressers, M. Malvaist charging two gold mohurs a month for attending to ladies, M. Siret charging Rs 8 for
cutting
ladies’ hair and Rs 4 for dressing it, with half prices for gents. For the gents of Calcutta were increasingly mindful of a certain pace that was set in London society. Mr Hastings might have preferred a plain brown coat but the general taste in such
matters ran to waistcoats of gold brocade or blue satin, sprigged and flowered at Rs 200–300 each. Calcutta, in fact, began to outstrip London in its fancies after a while; by the time William Hickey got home he was given to understand that the wardrobe he had built up in India was, by the most tailored canons of St James’s, just a little too loud.