Gravedigger - Grave Stories

Mostar’s inhabitants regarded it as an old soul that connected the two parts of the city together through a simple and friendly gesture.

Writing of the Stari Most, the bridge designed in the sixteenth century by the Ottoman architect Hajrudin, destroyed during the Bosnian war in 1993, and reconstructed in 2004, Arna Mackic continued,

Due to the city’s current extreme segregation…the connection has disappeared. The old bridge is no longer a connection but rather a separation of the city.*

Though there are still pock marked buildings and roofless carcasses with trees growing through them, the centre of Mostar today is picture-book pretty. Cafes are packed with tourists, their attention focused on the bridge in the hope of witnessing a high dive. Yet there is a dark underside to the town; the segregation of which Mackic speaks remains and is exemplified in the two schools under one roof policy, whereby Croats and Bosniaks enter by separate doors, attend segregated lessons with different teachers, and learn different versions of history and religion.

Leaving behind the riot of souvenir shops and ice cream parlours, I walked to the western outskirts of the city in search of something else. During World War II, Mostar had been known as the Red City on account of its particularly strong resistance to the Nazis. In 1965 the Serbian architect, Bogdan Bogdanovic, who had himself been a Yugoslav Partisan, designed and supervised the construction of the Partisan Necroplis to honour the 810 Yugoslav Partisans – Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and Jews – from Mostar who had fought against the Axis powers occupying Yugoslavia and against Ustasa, the fascist organisation operating a Nazi puppet state in Croatia.

The necropolis is set on a hillside overlooking the city and Bogdanovic designed it to mirror the town, explaining that “the two cities” would forever

look each other in the eyes: the city of the dead antifascist heroes, mostly young men and women, and the city of the living, for which they gave their lives.**

Speaking of the purity of their motives and their self-sacrifice, he sought to give the young Partisans, who were mostly aged between eighteen and twenty-five, something beautiful:

I thought that the fallen Mostarian antifascist fighters, all still boys and girls so to say, have the right, at least symbolically, to the beauty of dreams…Their small superterranean city overlooked, as I had promised their families, the heart of old Mostar and the then still existing bridge built by the great architect Hajrudin, once the most beautiful and daring stone bridge in the world.**

The City of My Friends, as Bogdanovic called it, was built by stone masons from Korcula in Croatia, assisted by voluntary youth brigades. Often, they worked through the night to avoid the heat of the day, and something magical emerged. Five terraces built into the side of the hill are reached by stone staircases. On the top terrace a cosmological sundial features the sun, planets, and moon. From beneath this a fountain once cascaded down the hillside to a pool at the base of the hill, symbolising the Neretva river flowing through Mostar and the tears of the Partisans. Domestic herbs – rosemary, lavender, cistus, sage – were planted.

There was deliberately no religious, nationalist, socialist or war imagery, no symbols of any ideology, the memorial was to honour all victims of fascism. Abstract stone grave markers, which have been likened to felled trees symbolising fallen youth, were laid on the terraces, each one commemorating a partisan. The stones bore only a name, age, and place of birth and death.

Tito was present to celebrate the completion of the memorial, and as Bogdanovic had intended, it became not just a necropolis but a loved and much used park, a picnic place, a playground:

The lilting, heathen character of the Partisan Necropolis could not remain unnoticed. Its terraces were quickly seized by children, whose playful voices echoed in a choir…sometimes until deep in the night.**

In an interview in 2009 the architect recalled,

Once a girl from Mostar told me that her parents had conceived her in the Partisan Necropolis. For me it was the most beautiful thing that could have happened there.***

Bogdanovic spoke out strongly against the nationalism which tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, he was subject to defamation and physical attacks which led him to self-imposed exile in Vienna.

During the Bosnian war, between 1992-95, the memorial was severely damaged. After the war it suffered neglect, malicious vandalism, and deliberate acts of desecration. Bogdanovic wrote from Vienna in 1997,

the only thing I could still wish for is…the right to, as honorary citizen of Mostar, create a secret niche to the left of the entrance gate, to accommodate my future urn. However, it now seems like I will not be in the company of my friends that way: the gravestones have cold-bloodedly and sadistically been crushed in a stone grinder. All that is left of my original promise is that the former city of the dead and the former city of the living still look at each other, only now with empty, black, and burned eyes.**

Bogdanovic died in Vienna in 2010. He was cremated there and his ashes returned to Belgrade where they were buried in the Sephardic cemetery next to his monument to the Jewish victims of fascism.

Partial repair and reconstruction of the Partisan Necropolis took place in 2005-2006 but later it was again subject to rubbish dumping, and destructive defacement. Overgrown and littered with beer bottles, it was described as a dangerous place, host to drinking and drug taking, and people were advised against visiting. In 2022 nationalist graffiti and swastikas, Ustase symbols, slurs against Bosniaks, and vilifications of Tito appeared, and the grave markers were again deliberately smashed. A British newspaper article in June 2023 reported,

When anti-fascists visit the site to lay flowers they need police protection, as there have been clashes with right wing groups on commemoration days… It can be dangerous even to talk about the necropolis now, never mind to visit it.****

And yet I had visited the Partisan Necropolis less than a month before that article was published. There were no signs to guide me and the unmarked approach from the road lay across an unpromising, scrubby expanse where a couple of cars appeared abandoned rather than parked. It was hot, silent, and uninviting. But beyond the inauspicious lower gateway, any sense of unease dissipated. Two men were determinedly scything the overgrown vegetation, and twenty metres above me I could see the terraces reached by worn paths winding through the trees. It was like entering an ancient site dominated by a great theatre.

Weeds grew through the pathways, the fountain and pool were dry, and the stone grave markers still lay smashed on the terraces. But the evil graffiti had been removed and the entire site cleaned of debris.

In two hours walking around and sitting in the sunshine, I encountered few other people: a couple of other tourists, two local people walking their dog, a small group of teenage boys. For all the desecration caused by the despicable attacks, it remains a beautiful place, albeit a quiet, melancholy beauty today, with none of the joyful, exuberance of its early days. Sead Dulic describes it:

This is our statue of Liberty, our triumphal arch, out Taj Mahal. It is a celebration of life and Mostar. It was built as a city of the dead mirroring the city of the living for a city that lost so much.*****

The fountain was shaped as four layered gears, symbol of a driving force. The Necropolis overlooks old Mostar

Grave markers placed on the terraces have been scattered, crushed, and broken

Again “the gravestones have cold bloodedly and sadistically been crushed”

They have been likened to felled trees symbolising fallen youth

Each stone bears only the name, age and places of birth and death of the Partisan

Mostar may still be a city divided. Fascist groups may wreak repeated destruction on the stones of the Partisan Necropolis and mount ugly, violent attacks on their political opponents. But though bruised and battered the Necropolis is still there, still treasured, still embodying the memory of the Partisans, their bravery, their self-sacrifice. Visit them if you are in Mostar, however short your time there, for despite Bogdanovic’s late despair, their necropolis remains not just a memorial to their courage and ideals but an inspiration and encouragement, a symbol of hope for a better world.

And although Bogdanovic’s ashes may lie in Belgrade, if there is such a thing as a spirit, his is surely here alongside his comrades.

*******

*Arna Macki, The Partisan Necropolis: Mostar’s Empty Stare, 6 October 2015, https://failedarchitecture.com>the-partisan-necropolis

**Bogdan Bogdanovic, The City of My Friends, translated by Arna Mackic and reprinted in The Partisan Necropolis.

***Quoted in Mostar, Spomenik Database, https://spomenikdatabase.org >Mostar. There is also more information about the architecture of the necr0polis and some wonderful photographs here.

****Chris Leslie, Protecting Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Anti-Fascist Legacy, 2 June 2023, https://www.theguardian .com>Protecting Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Anti-fascist Legacy

*****Sead Dulic, theatre director and head of the National Association of Anti-Fascists, quoted by Chris Leslie, above.

Rosa, My Beloved Deux Chevaux

By Gravedigger

On May 26, 2025

In Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators

My first car was a Deux Chevaux, and it was love. It was a hasty purchase. I had taken my first teaching job in the Kent town of Ashford and rented a cottage in a village six miles away. There was no bus service. With days to go before term started, I handed over £50 to an American tourist on Crystal Palace Camp Site. He had been travelling around Europe, and when we first met, Rosa was adorned with several months’ worth of his washing.

I called her Rosa after Rosa Luxemburg and Rosa Parks. She had a 602cc engine, rectangular headlights with halogen globes, a gear stick which came horizontally out of the dashboard with a handle curving upwards, a canvas roll back sunroof, and four doors. Also, a selection of scratches, dents, and rips in her upholstery; Rosa had seen life.

André Citroën’s brief in 1948 had been to produce a low cost, low fuel consumption car with simplicity of maintenance. It was to be capable of transporting four people and 50kg of farm goods to market at 50km/hour. Given the lack of good, paved roads in France at the time, it was further suggested that the car should be able to cross a freshly ploughed field with a full basket of eggs on the passenger seat without breaking them.

The motoring journalist LJK Setright lauded

the most intelligent application of minimalism ever to succeed as a car,*

and described it as a vehicle of

remorseless rationality.**

Peter Elsworth was less complimentary asking,

Does it come with a can opener?***

My Rosa came with a left-hand drive, and she registered her velocity in kilometres. This, combined with some powerful rattles, gave a satisfying delusion of speed. Her stickers affirmed her commitment to saving the whales and advancing nuclear disarmament. We became part of a special club, tooting and waving to our fellow 2CVs and their drivers, whether peering through a wet windscreen behind furious wipers or exulting in the sunshine with the roof rolled down. And together we learned that braking on icy roads is not a clever idea.

We took a summer holiday in Brittany where Rosa indulged her Gallic temperament, regularly stopping without warning. She revelled in the attentions of her fellow countrymen whose national pride required them to huddle around her engine discussing her symptoms until they coaxed her into life again.

By the time we caught the ferry home she was running as smoothly as a Deux Chevaux can…provided she was given a push start. The deckhands on Brittany Ferries took this in their stride, and we rolled on and off the ferry in style. With markedly less charm the British customs officer demanded that her engine be switched off while he inspected the contents of her boot, but he backed down when advised that he too might find himself obliged to push.

After a couple of years in Kent, Rosa and I moved on to an eccentric girls’ boarding school then housed at New Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. The staff rivalled the girls for delinquent behaviour. After driving my head of department to the pub one evening, Rosa’s headlights failed on the return journey. My head of department had no intention of walking home. “Just drive very slowly,” he ordered, and producing a ridiculously small torch he hung out of the window attempting to shine it in our path as we inched along the narrow lanes.

When I bought my first flat in Bath, I had no need of Pickfords, I had only to load Rosa up three times and we had conveyed everything I owned to our new home.

Rosa’s insouciant disregard for double yellow lines sometimes caused problems

Rosa had always liked to park in front of a stately pile, and in Bath she was particularly partial to The Circus and The Royal Crescent. But she had not been young when we met, and now she was growing old. I had to keep a steak hammer in the glove compartment, for on cold mornings the key would not turn in the ignition until I hammered on the ignition box. Yet Rosa still smiled and preened when having watched this performance other motorists would come over to see if we needed help or the loan of “proper tools.”

Rosa always liked to park in front of a stately pile,

even when she had to share that space with others.

Rosa’s ultimate pleasure: parked in The Royal Crescent, on a yellow line with a nervous passenger

As the last MOT loomed, we both knew that it would be fatal. We were not surprised when the garage mechanic listed the reasons: rusting floor, failing brakes, bald tyres, dodgy electrics. My Rosa had come to the end of the road.

There have been other cars but only Rosa ever held my heart, and years later in Paris I made a special visit to Montparnasse Cemetery to thank André Citroën for the joy he gave me by producing the most magical little car ever.

Grave of André Citroën, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

*LKJ Selright, Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car, Granta, p.173

**LKJ Selright, The Spirit of Motoring, Past, Present and Future, in The Daily Telegraph, December 27, 2003

***Peter Elsworth in The New York Times.

The Taj Mahal: The Most Beautiful Mausoleum in the World

By Gravedigger

On May 11, 2025

In Dynasties

It is always galling to be obliged to agree with any timeworn banality; galling but sometimes unavoidable, for it is impossible to deny that the Taj Mahal is the most beautiful mausoleum in the world, surpassing all others, defying hyperbole and meretricious adjectives.

Commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan when his wife Mumtaz Mahal died giving birth to their fourteenth child in 1631, the Taj has accreted myths, usually with little substance. It is said to be a monument to a great love story, that Shah Jahan was inconsolable after the death of his wife, that he planned to build a Black Taj for himself on the other side of the Yamuna River linking the two mausoleums by a bridge. There are stories of him severing the heads and gouging the eyes of his architects and craftsmen once the building was complete to prevent the creation of a rival structure. Later when deposed by his son, Aurangzeb, and imprisoned in the Agra Fort, it is claimed that Shah Jahan spent his last years gazing intently at the Taj, and when his sight began to fail, he lay in bed contemplating its reflection in a diamond fixed to the wall.

Yet such is the mystique and allure of the Taj Mahal that it has no need of fabricated legends. It stands at the apotheosis of Mughal architecture, drawing on Timurid building styles inspirationally fused with the traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Its roots lie in the mausoleum of Timur (Tamerlane) in Samarkand. Gur-e- Amir, the Tomb of the King, was built in 1403 when Timur’s grandson and chosen heir died. It became the family crypt of the Timurid dynasty, later housing Timur himself, his sons, and other grandsons.

At the Gur-e- Amir complex a traditional Islamic iwan or gateway opens to a courtyard and a symmetrical mausoleum with a fluted azure dome. The gateway comprises a rectangular space walled on three sides and decorated with calligraphy and blue ceramic tiles bearing geometric designs. Within the eight-sided mausoleum blue tiles jostle with onyx and marble stalactites. A dark green jade cenotaph indicates the location of Timur’s tomb which lies in the crypt beneath.

The Gur-e-Amir has attracted its own improbable folktales, for inscriptions on Timur’s cenotaph read:

When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble

Whosoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I.

The Russian anthropologist Gerasimov opened the tomb in 1941… two days later the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin allegedly believed the curse and had Timur’s body reburied with full Islamic burial rites…to be rewarded with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad.

Symmetrical mausoleum seen across the courtyard

Timur’s cenotaph, the tomb is in a crypt beneath

Timur was the progenitor of the Mughal dynasty, for Babur, the first Mughal Emperor (1483-1530) was descended from him on his father’s side. Babur inherited Fergana in eastern Uzbekistan and conquered Kabul and Samarkand, before moving on to India, taking Delhi and Agra. And it was the tomb built for Babur’s son, Humayun, which was the first great Mughal architectural masterpiece.

Humayun’s tomb in New Delhi, commissioned by his Persian wife and designed by Persian architects in 1562, introduced central Asian architecture to India. It was modelled on the Gur-e- Amir with the same traditional gateway, geometrical symmetry, central bulbous dome, arched alcoves, lattice stone screens, and a paradise garden. The enclosed garden, divided into quarters with a main axis of water, was the first garden tomb on the Indian subcontinent. But the mausoleum also drew on Indian devices with decorative chattri, and it was built using indigenous stone, with red sandstone facework, inlaid with bands of white marble. The builders embraced the hierarchical use of sandstone and marble representing the kshatriyas (warrior caste) and Brahmins (priest caste) respectively.

At Sikandra, the mausoleum of Akbar, (1605) the third Mughal ruler, exhibits the same synthesis of styles, combining a traditional Islamic gateway, Arabic calligraphy and lattice work, with the use red sandstone bearing white marble features, and with chattri topped minarets at each corner of the gateway.

Entrance gate to Akbar’s mausoleum. The symmetrical minarets topped with chattri

The tomb of Mizra Ghiyas Beg, the Itmad-ud-Daulah, or Baby Taj, marks the transition between the first monumental phase of Mughal architecture, exemplified in the red sandstone and marble decoration of the Humayun and Akbar tombs, and the second phase of white marble buildings inlaid with delicate pietra dura detailing. Built by Nur Jehan, wife of Jehangir, the fourth Mughal Emperor, for her father in 1622, the Baby Taj is the first Mughal structure built completely of marble. It stands on a red sandstone plinth, its walls inlaid with polychromatic precious and semi-precious stones and perforated by jali screens with ornamental patterns. Octagonal minarets, topped by chattri, rise at each corner, maintaining perfect symmetry. Often described as a jewel box, it is acknowledged as the ultimate prototype and inspiration for the Taj.

Itmad-ud-Daulah, the Baby Taj, white marble on sandstone plinth

With the Taj Mahal, Indo-Islamic architecture reached its apogee. The Taj retains its Persian roots: the traditional gateway; the symmetry, balance and harmony of the mausoleum, with a white marble minaret at each corner, extending to the identical sandstone mosque and guest house which flank the central structure; the bulbous dome; and lattice windows. Behind a screen the false sarcophagi of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan, who was buried beside his wife three decades later, indicate the position of the burials in the tomb chamber below. In the only asymmetrical element, Shah Jahan’s cenotaph is larger than that of his wife, mounted on a taller base, and with a traditional pen box on top. But the translucent Indian white marble is now the dominant material, used for both the platform and the mausoleum. Both are inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones: jade, crystal, turquoise, lapis lazuli, sapphire, carnelian, coral, onyx. The skill and artistry of the Indian stonecutters, inlayers, and carvers have created exquisite flowers and patterns. Yet withal the complex is set around a Persian garden of paradise completing the perfect synthesis.

The cenotaphs are concealed behind a stone lattice

Dusk, from the opposite bank of the Yamuna River

An Appreciation of John Harington, Alexander Cumming,and Thomas Crapper.

By Gravedigger

On April 27, 2025

In Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators

Were I allowed but one luxury on a desert island, I would not need to think twice: a luxury bathroom of course, with deep tub, power shower, an endlessly renewing pile of soft towels, an exotic range of soaps, oils, and lotions…and a plumbed in flush lavatory. I have always been grateful that I did not live before the invention of the latter.

I suspect that I am not alone in this, for amongst the soot-stained Victorian and Edwardian tombstones at Elmers End Cemetery in South London, only that of Thomas Crapper (1836-1910) has merited a clean and a new plaque confirming the identity its incumbent.

Grave of Thomas Crapper, Elmers End Cemetery.

It has been cleaned, but already dirt and lichen are renewing the attack,

and the inscription is becoming obscured,

but a new plaque leaves no doubt as to the identity of the incumbent.

Urban myth, encouraged by Wallace Reyburn’s fictional biography Flushed with Pride: the Story of Thomas Crapper, avers that Crapper invented the flush lavatory. It further alleges that American servicemen based in England during World War I, seeing his name on sanitary ware, coined the term crapper as a synonym for lavatory, and the vulgar slang for bodily waste followed. In fact, the word is of Middle English origin, originally denoting chaff, weeds, or other rubbish, and the flush lavatory predated Thomas Crapper.

T.C. Crapper and Co. did produce sanitary ware. Moreover the plumber and businessman was responsible for several improvements in flush lavatories including the introduction of the floating ballcock, silencers to cut out the noise of the cistern filling, and the invention of the U-bend plumbing trap, an improvement on the earlier S-bend, preventing sewer gases from entering the water closet. Less successful were his attempts to produce an automatic flush and a self-raising seat.

When he opened the world’s first bath, lavatory, and sink showroom at 120 King’s Road in 1870 Victorian ladies putatively grew faint at the sight of the porcelain displayed behind the huge plate glass windows. His famous “try before you buy” policy probably offended their sensibilities too.

But if Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush lavatory who did? In the 1440s Ralph Cromwell, Treasurer to Henry VI, built a high tower, topped by a cistern to gather rainwater, at Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire. When the sluice holding back the water in the cistern was opened once a week the water came down through a chimney-like structure flushing out the latrine below into the moat. Similarly, cisterns on the roofs of houses in Medieval London had discharged water into lead pipes which flushed the contents of the latrines into the streets.

Despite these early examples, the credit for inventing the first flush lavatory is usually attributed to John Harington (1560-1612), courtier, author, and translator. Certainly his system was more sophisticated (there was a porcelain bowl, there was a drain) and garnered greater publicity. Harington installed a flush lavatory at his manor house in Kelston, Somerset. A description of this device which used the force of water from a cistern operated by a valve to flush out the bowl into a drain appeared in his book “A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax,” published in 1596. Calling his invention Ajax was a play on “jakes”, a sixteenth century euphemism for outhouses or privies.

But the essay was not a mere description of the invention, it was also a coded attack on the Earl of Leicester whom Harington held responsible for the stercus or excrement that was poisoning society in the form of torture and state sponsored libels – of which Harington’s relatives had fallen victim. The political allegory was none too subtle, and Harington was temporarily banished from court for his attack on the Queen’s favourite.

Despite her disapproval of his politics Elizabeth did have one of his devices installed at her palace in Richmond, Surrey. But the expense combined with the lack of an S or U bend to curb smells prevented the Ajax from achieving wider popularity.

That deficiency was remedied by Alexander Cumming who, in 1775, patented the S-bend which retained water permanently in the waste pipe thus preventing sewer gases from entering buildings. So, the invention was complete almost a century before Thomas Crapper opened his show rooms.

Harington’s gravestone can be found in Kelston churchyard, but while providing a detailed account of his genealogy, disappointingly it makes no reference to his invention.

The Harington family tombs, St.Nicholas churchyard, Kelston

The stone commemorates John Harington, his wife and descendants, and references his ancestors

Cumming was buried in the graveyard of St. James Chapel, Pentonville, north London. The chapel was later demolished and the cemetery turned into Joseph Grimaldi Park. As the name implies, Grimaldi’s gravestone was rescued and is a centre piece of the park, but sadly that of Cumming disappeared.

*************

For photographs of Thomas Crapper’s products, (and another tomb) see At God’s Convenience, February 29, 2024, by the incomparable Gentle Author, https://spitalfieldslife .com>2024/02/29>at-gods-convenience

John Nicholson: Hero of Delhi or Imperial Psychopath?

By Gravedigger

On April 13, 2025

In Colonialists

When I realised that my hotel in New Delhi lay only a few hundred yards from the Nicholson Cemetery, and that I had a couple of hours free time before dinner, I determined to seek out John Nicholson. My street plan had already shown itself to be fallible, so hesitantly I sought precise directions from our guide. I was uncomfortably aware that a scion of the East India Company, convinced of his own superior race and with a reputation for excessive violence even amongst his fellow officers, would be rightly loathed in India. Clumsily I attempted to make clear that my interest in graves was not necessarily at odds with an abhorrence for their occupants. I quoted William Dalrymple’s view that Nicholson was “an imperial psychopath.”

Our guide was at once delighted by my desire to visit Nicholson and incensed by Dalrymple’s description and my perceived ignorance of the courage and manly virtues of the soldier hero. Giving me precise directions to the cemetery, he expressed his dismay that so few English people today have heard of Nicholson and advised me to read Charles Allen’s Soldier Sahibs as a corrective to my nescience.

John Nicholson (1822-57) was an Anglo-Irish military officer with the East India Company. Initially formed as a trading organisation, the Company gained control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent using its own army. When Nicholson arrived in India in 1839 the Company was expanding its political and military influence. Nicholson welcomed military action as an opportunity to advance his career. He took part in the first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-42), and the first and second Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845-46 and 1848-49). During the latter, the Company annexed the Punjab and the North-West Frontier.

After the Second Sikh War Nicholson was appointed as District Commissioner in Rawalpindi in the Punjab. An incident from this time illustrates his approach to maintaining law and order: confronting a recalcitrant robber chieftain, he ran him through with his sword and cut off his head which he displayed on his desk. Then inviting the other headmen in the district to call on him he pointed to the head advising them to ponder their fate if they were tempted to crime.

In 1852 he became Deputy Commissioner of the Bannu area which he ruled like a despot. Persistently he punished and humiliated those whom he perceived as showing disrespect to the colonial government. When one Indian leader in a visiting deputation spat on the ground in front of him, Nicholson had the man forced to the ground, obliged to kneel, and lick up his own spittle. When an imam outside a mosque failed to greet him with a customary salaam Nicholson had the man brought before him to publicly humiliate him by shaving off his beard.

The First Indian War of Independence, 1857, still referred to in some English texts as The Indian Mutiny, was far more than a rebellion by the sepoys in response to the introduction of beef and pig fat to grease the cartridges of the new Enfield rifles. The war had deeper underlying causes: the relentless annexation of territory, specifically the recent conquest of Awadh, by the British; the increasing Imperial arrogance and the harsh treatment of Indians by comparison with the eighteenth century integration; British proposals to abolish the Mughal court and impose British law and control in Delhi; the decline in sepoys’ pay and promotion opportunities; the General Enlistment Act obliging Indian soldiers to serve abroad; Christian proselytising by missionaries which was undermining the Muslim and Hindu way of life with an evangelical drive for conversions witnessing the forced closure of madrassas; harsh taxes and profiteering from native resources while the bulk of the Indian population lived in poverty.

For the British however this was a mutiny, and the East India Company army was full of violent, racist officers outraged that British rule was being challenged. There was a general contempt for India and Indians, the British were on a god given mission to rescue a backward, inferior country via evangelical Christianity and Imperialism. The atrocities committed by the sepoys, killing not just British officers, but women and children, provided an excuse for reprisals and brutal vengeance. Sepoys were bayonetted and fired from cannon; old people, women and children were burned to death in their houses. The right to revenge was after all enshrined in the bible.

For Nicholson more than anyone it was obvious that the mutiny should be crushed at once before it “spread like smallpox.” There is little doubt that Nicholson enjoyed the war. God, he was confident, was on the side of the British. As commander of a Moveable Column, he swept across the Punjab, terrorising rebels into submission, hanging their leaders without court martials. Convinced that hanging was insufficient punishment he made clear that he would have preferred to flay alive, impale, or burn his victims. He gave his troops a free hand with prisoners, unconcerned when they engaged in vicious torture.

In Jalandhar he entered the British mess tent to announce dramatically, “I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks.” He had been told that the soup prepared by the regimental cooks was poisoned, and when they refused to taste it, he force fed it to a monkey who expired. All the cooks were hanged without trial.

For Nicholson, the end came at the siege of Delhi. The sepoys had captured Delhi, declared the aged Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II their leader, and massacred the Christian population. The assault on the city was under the command of Nicholson. His troops breached the walls of the Red Fort, but as he moved along the inside of the wall between the Kabul Gate and the Burn Bastion a sepoy shot him from the roof of a nearby house. A week later however Delhi was taken by the British. The Muslim population was massacred. Nicholson died nine days later in hospital. Zafar died in exile. The marble structures in the Red Fort were demolished and a British barracks erected.

Distant view of the walls surrounding the Red Fort from the minaret of the Jama Masjid

One of the gates in the walls of the Red Fort

Few of the marble structures in the Red Fort remain today,

but those which still exist are exquisite,

unlike the British barracks which replaced them.

A new graveyard had been prepared, and a white marble slab plundered from Zafar’s Moonlight Garden in the Red Fort was placed over Nicholson’s grave. The inscription reads:

The Grave

Of

Brigadier-General

John Nicholson

Who

Led the Assault at Delhi

But fell

In the Hour of Victory

Mortally wounded

And died September 23, 1857

Aged 35

Grave of John Nicholson, Nicholson Cemetery, Delhi

The white marble slab was appropriated from the Red Fort

For the most part the Victorian public were in thrall to the ruthless, seemingly invincible men who had taken Delhi. There was hysterical adulation of them, but especially of Nicholson, “The hero of Delhi” and “The Lion of the Punjab.” Eulogies described him as the bravest and the best, noble, tender, modest, heroic, honourable, just, patriotic, steadfast.

“As long as an Englishman survives in India, the name of John Nicholson will not be forgotten” wrote Viceroy John Lawrence. Henry Newbolt wrote the vile Ballad of John Nicholson; one verse will suffice to give the flavour:

Have ye served us for a hundred years
And yet ye know not why?
We brook no doubt of our mastery,
We rule until we die.”

Field Marshall Roberts asserted that Nicholson was a military genius who gave up his life in defence of his country, an odd claim given that Nicholson was trying to prevent Indians from defending their country.

Yet some of Nicholson’s superiors regarded him as dangerously out of control. For even by the standards of his times Nicholson’s actions and attitudes were extreme. He ignored orders, forced his men beyond their capabilities, and extended punishment to those outside his jurisdiction. John Lawrence, later the Viceroy of India, suggested that he was too keen on confronting and humiliating Indian leaders, flogging them on any pretext even when he lacked authority.

Recent writers have been distinctly less adulatory describing Nicholson as a violent bully, a racist, a religious bigot, arrogant, boorish, a man who loathed India and its inhabitants – whom he thought ignorant and barbarous, a gloomy Calvinist, a brute, a war monger, a torturer, a man convinced that he belonged to a superior race, … an Imperial psychopath.

Today Dalrymple’s pithy epithet resonates true. And if this is so in England, why was my guide in India so defensive of his memory? Surely no Indian could do other than loathe the man?

The historian, Thomas Macaulay, (1800-1859), wrote of the divine mission of the officers of the East India Company to expand their territory along the North-West Frontier. He further urged them to create between themselves and “the swarming millions”:

A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

My guide had attended Mayo College, the so-called Eton of the East, established in 1873, with precisely that intention. Had its powerful propaganda had been so depressingly successful, in shaping the views of this otherwise highly intelligent, educated, knowledgeable man? Like all Imperialist organisations the British Empire has much to answer for and its evil influence is not easily eradicated, still lingering on where we might least expect it.

*************

For a superb telling of the events of 1857 see:

William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857. Bloomsbury, 2006.

And for a gripping but more defensive account:

Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: The Men who made the North-West Frontier. John Murray, 2012, first published 2000.

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John Nicholson: Hero of Delhi or Imperial Psychopath?