Flight by Elephant (32 page)

Authors: Andrew Martin

BOOK: Flight by Elephant

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Would a truly villainous man have counted the apparently saintly Mr Ogden among his close friends? Rossiter also inspired affection in Maurice Collis, author of
Lords of the Sunset
. The hallmark of his behaviour on the jungle trek seems to have been impatience to get out – surely forgivable in the case of a man accompanied by a pregnant wife and a baby son. As we have noted, he hadn’t wanted to be ‘left in the lurch’ with his wife and child.

You could say that, in making his own escape from the Tilung Hka camp, Sir John Rowland had done just that. Even without these complications, Rossiter the intellectual and sybarite (the taste for beautiful women, for marrow jam, for curry cooked in the jungle) would not have been Sir John Rowland’s idea of ‘a dashed stout fellow’. Put next to each other at a club dinner, they’d have turned aside pretty quickly. In the camp at the Tilung Hka, they had cooperated to the extent of jointly writing the memo to Mackrell, and Sir John had stressed the importance of having powdered milk for baby John. But the plight of the Rossiters ought to have brought out the Sir Galahad in Sir John to a much greater extent than it actually did. At some point, the pair fell out, and in the letter Sir John sent to Mackrell thanking him for rescuing the remainder of his party, he asked, ‘I wonder what you thought of the Rossiter outfit? No I suppose it isn’t fair to ask …’

If Mackrell gave an opinion, we don’t know what it was. We do know that he wrote to a friend saying that Sir John ought to have ‘settled all differences’ and brought the whole of his party out at once. But that would have been impossible, given the condition of some of the party, at which point it might be as well to vacate the judgement seat.

Late Period Mackrell

Thacker’s Indian Directory
shows Gyles Mackrell as a director of the firm of Octavius Steel in the volume for 1947–8, where he is listed as the holder of the George Medal as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross. He does not appear in the volume for 1948–9.

In 1946, he had married for the second time – to one Rosalind Agnes Slaughter, daughter of a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps. As a match for Mackrell she sounds about right. The two settled down in the village of Bruisyard in Suffolk, which also seems right for Mackrell. It is a beautiful village, with a Saxon church and pretty houses widely separated by trees and woods, and facing away from one another, as though politely agreeing to differ. The village thereby gives a hint of the ranginess of India, and it is only about fifteen miles from the coast, and the air that the returning planters often sought.

It seems that Rosalind liked India, which Mackrell’s first wife possibly did not, and the newly-weds sailed back and forth between Liverpool and Bombay a few times in the late 1940s. This was Mackrell taking his last sips from the cup.

Rosalind may be the attractive, dark-haired woman who appears in some of the as yet uncurated films he shot in India after the war. The woman is often seen fishing in wide rivers, occasionally turning to smile shyly at the camera, but clearly much more interested in catching a fish than posing for the lens. These later films are in colour, and they’re gentler than the pre-war films, with fewer dead tigers (there were fewer tigers left to kill) and more meditative studies of flowing rivers, or butterflies on leaves. Mackrell would sometimes show his Indian films, including the footage of his rescues, in the dark and dusty village halls of Suffolk. This might seem egotistical, but he himself hardly ever appears in these films. When he does appear he is on the move, talking to Indian servants, organizing, with his pipe or a pair of glasses in his right hand. He looks like a film director, in fact, creating the jungle scenes – an impression reinforced by the invariable prevalence of canvas-back chairs in the various camps.

In the final pages of
Green Gold
, their analysis of the tea industry and wartime Assam, the Macfarlanes wrote:

When the medals were handed out at the end of the war did it never occur to anyone to ask who had actually won the war? Or why tea garden labourers and Nagas, Abors, Mishmis and others did not dangle MBEs from their chests? Without them and their work, both in the construction of the road [Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur] and in supplying the troops … the Japanese would have reached India.

Mackrell took much the same line about the rescue he led. He was slightly embarrassed about receiving the George Medal for gallantry. A number of British newspapers reported the award: ‘To the 200 people whose lives he saved, he will always be known as the Elephant Man … to the Company which employs him he is “a darned good fellow who has done a magnificent job”.’ There are no quotes from Mackrell. One of the articles features a photograph of him; it is blurred, he looks overdressed in a suit and tie, and he wears a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his face. He had written to a friend that he was worried people would think he had gone back into the jungle a second time specifically in order to earn the medal.

His diary of the rescues concludes with the following:

I close this diary with the statement that I have already made to everyone: that too much credit has been given to me, too little to Millar and Leyden, not nearly enough to the Rifles, Porters, Mahouts and Boatmen and that without all the latter splendid fellows, little or nothing could have been done in time to save the bulk of this party.

When he showed his films, there was always a closing caption to the same effect.

About three hundred people tried to come through the Chaukan Pass, of whom about forty died in the attempt or as a direct result of it. The dead were mainly Gurkha soldiers or lone Indians whose movements it is impossible at this date to chronicle. All those who survived the trek did so directly or indirectly because of Mackrell. In addition to those mentioned in this book as having been saved by him, he also saved other lone Indians, including a young boy, and a couple of further Europeans, but they were not with the main parties, and it is therefore hard to say exactly where and
how
he rescued them.

Gyles Mackrell died at his house in Bruisyard of a coronary thrombosis on 20 February 1959. He was seventy-one. His wife, Rosalind, died in Ipswich in 1987.

A river runs along the bottom of the garden behind the cottage they had lived in. It is the River Alde. The water is green, and green-shaded with bushes and trees; it is about ten feet wide, and fairly close observation suggests that it
remains
about ten feet even after a week of heavy English rain. As rivers go, the Alde is nothing compared to the Dapha; but it runs on to the sea, as they all do.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baird-Murray, Maureen,
A World Overturned: A Burmese Childhood, 1933–47
(Constable, 1998)

Barker, George M.,
A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam
(Thacker, Spink & Co., 1884)

Carew, Tim,
The Longest Retreat, Burma Campaign, 1942
(Mayflower, 1972)

Carrington, Richard,
Elephants: A Short Account of Their Natural History, Evolution and Influence on Mankind
(Basic Books, 1962)

Collis, Maurice,
Lords of the Sunset: A Tour of the Shan States
(Faber & Faber, 1938)

Fraser, George MacDonald,
Quartered Safe Out Here
(HarperCollins, 1995)

Glancey, Jonathan,
Nagaland: A Journey to India’s Forgotten Frontier
(Faber & Faber, 2011)

Goodall, Felicity,
Exodus Burma: The British Escape Through the Jungles of Death 1942
(The History Press, 2011)

Jesse, F. Tennyson,
The Story of Burma
(Macmillan, 1946)

Macfarlane, Alan and Iris,
Green Gold: The Empire of Tea
(Ebury Press, 2004)

Orwell, George,
Burmese Days
(Harper & Brothers, 1934)

Tyson, Geoffrey,
Forgotten Frontier
(W. H. Targett & Co., 1946)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As mentioned at the outset, this book is largely based on the diaries of Gyles Mackrell, Sir John Rowland, Guy Millar, Bill Howe, Ritchie Gardiner and Eric Ivan Milne. I read the latter two at the Asian and African Studies reading room of the British Library, and the Imperial War Museum study room respectively, and I am grateful to the ever-helpful staff in both rooms. The other diaries I read at the Centre of South Asian Studies, at Cambridge University. Much of their Mackrell archive was compiled by Denis Segal, and without his help and encouragement this book could not have been written. I am also grateful to Dr Kevin Greenbank and Dr Annamaria Motrescu of the CSAS.

I am grateful to the following descendants of the ‘Chaukan Club’: Scott Rossiter, John Rossiter, Brian Wilson, Nan Howe. I would like to thank Lynne Thompson of Woburn Safari Park for putting me in touch with Dr Khyne U Mar of the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, who answered my questions about elephants, and Professor Thomas Dormundy, for speaking to me about opium. Steve Kippax and Ron Bridge were also most helpful about military matters in Upper Burma. Stephen Brown, Caroline Findlay and her family told me about the life of a tea planter in Assam, and Dr Rachel Isba of Liverpool University talked me through some tropical diseases.

I am indebted to the staff of the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum at Flixton; to Andrew Dennis at the Royal Air Force Museum and Alan Scadding, historian of Epsom College.

I travelled to Kolkata, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh with Travel the Unknown, whose guide in Arunachal, Nyaken Riba Munna, never wearied of my constant questions.

All errors in the text are entirely my responsibility.

Also by Andrew Martin

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Bilton

The Bobby Dazzlers

In the ‘Jim Stringer’ Series

The Necropolis Railway

The Blackpool Highflyer

The Lost Luggage Porter

Murder at Deviation Junction

Death on a Branch Line

The Last Train to Scarborough

The Somme Stations

The Baghdad Railway Club

NON-FICTION

How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man’s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts

Ghoul Britannia: Notes from a Haunted Isle

Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube

About the Author

Andrew Martin was born in Yorkshire, and now lives in London. After qualifying as a barrister, he turned to freelance writing, and he has won awards both for his journalism and fiction. His latest novel is
The Baghdad Railway Club
. His non-fiction includes
Underground
,
Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube
.

Copyright

First published in Great Britain by

Fourth Estate

A Division of HarperCollins
Publishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

London W6 8JB

www.4thestate.com

The right of Andrew Martin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007461523

Version 1

Cover photograph © Gyles Mackrell/SWNS

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