“Welcome to Lucknow”, said the guide who met me at the railway station.
“This is very important place for Britishers.”
I have long been intrigued by the Indian Mutiny of 1857 – or the First War of Independence, as most Indians now call it – when Lucknow was the site of a notorious siege. It lasted from the end of June until the middle of November and of the 3,000-plus British residents, loyal Indian soldiers and servants who crowded into the Residency compound to defend themselves, fewer than 1,000 survived. Fired upon by canons and snipers, threatened from below by tunnelling, the besieged were also under constant attack from cholera and dysentery.But a surprising number found time to keep diaries, many of which were later published, and for a long time the nearby town of Cawnpore – now Kanpur – site an a horrific massacre, struck terror into Victorian hearts. Both Lucknow and Kanpur became places of pilgrimage. Impressive memorial churches were built and travellers came to see where their countrymen had suffered and perished.
When I told the guide that I was keen to visit the sites connected with the 1857 uprising, he nodded. “Yes, Lucknow is very important for you British,” he repeated. “Your Cliff Richard was born here. You know him?”
“I know of him,” I admitted.
“And your Winston Churchill. His first job was as a reporter on the Lucknow Pioneer”
This last may have been a slight exaggeration (though Churchill certainly wrote for the paper) but there was obviously more to Lucknow than memories of the mutiny.
Our first stop was at La Martiniere college, a sprawling stone mansion that makes Castle Howard look like a cottage. It houses a grand public school, founded in 1840 by a Frenchman, Major General Claude Martin. The gables are topped by vast rampant stone lions behind whose gaping mouths and staring eyes fires would be lit to scare off wild animals paddling through the surrounding swamps to eat the pupils. This was the prototype for the school envisaged by Kipling when Kim was sent by the mysterious Col Creighton to be educated as a sahib. It was amusing to see a field full of latterday Kims joyously kicking a ball around. During the mutiny, the boys of La Martiniere joined in the defence of the Residency, which probably made a change from arithmetic. It is a longstanding tradition that school-leavers carve their names into the great stone steps and the long rows of these inscriptions make poignant reading. I could not help wondering what became of C Wheeler 1879, L Posselthwaite 1924 and H Marcham 1939.
Nothing prepared me for the afternoon I spent at the Lucknow Residency. I left the guide at the main gate and paid my entrance fee and wandered in. This huge compound of immaculately preserved ruins, set amid neatly tended memorial gardens, has a strange, haunting beauty. At first I happily followed a plan and explored Dr Fayrer’s house, the Treasury that served as an arsenal, the great Banqueting Hall and the tirkhana where the women and children sheltered in the cellars. This building now houses a small, rather neglected museum. Beneath a plaque commemorating Susanna Palmer who was “killed in this room by a canon ball on the 1st July 1857 in her nineteenth year” is a pile of canon balls resembling great Maltesers.
It took all my courage to climb a precarious crumbling brick stairway to the top of the main Residency building’s sole surviving tower, which affords a fine view of the whole site. These great skeletal, burnt-out buildings have been kept exactly as they were when the siege ended. Something of the human suffering witnessed by the exposed bricks and mortar seems to have survived. I walked through the endless vistas of battered archways listening to the echoes of my own feet. Despite the great heat, an unutterable chill lingers in this sorrowful place.
The shattered buildings may have been tidied up but nothing that happened here has been tidied away. The huge banyan trees, living witnesses to the distress and destruction all those years ago, stand silently amid the neat beds of scarlet lilies that fleck the gardens like splashes of blood.
It was a relief to emerge into Lucknow’s busy streets and push my way through the Chowk, a lively bazaar where I ended up sitting on a carpet sipping tea, looking through dozens of exquisitely embroidered shalwar kameez. Bargaining is always a pleasure although it was difficult to do so seriously when the sumptuous three-piece outfit I bought cost all of £5. I wore this next day when I drove out to Kanpur.
Forty miles from Lucknow, situated both on the Grand Trunk Road and the Ganges, Kanpur was once an important garrison. Today it is a busy industrial centre processing leather. The pungent smell of the tanneries fills the air. It was here that the forces of Nana Sahib of Bithur laid siege to about a thousand British residents for a long debilitating month. When only a few hundred were left alive, a truce was negotiated by which the women, children and wounded would leave by boat for Allahabad. The moment they were on board, however, Nana Sahib commanded his men to open fire. Those who did not die instantly were bayoneted to death and cast into the infamous well. A tablet on the wall inside the All Saints’ Memorial Church commemorating a soldier, his wife and her brother who perished, states: “This Tablet has been erected as a tribute of affection to them by their sorrowing relatives. Vengeance is mine I will repay saith the Lord”.
The site of the well has been covered over and the Gothic screen that once surrounded it and the beautiful marble statue of a grieving angel that stood on top are now in the peaceful garden behind the church. I could not help thinking about my many predecessors who had made their way here over the years, attempting to come to some understanding of the terrible events.
The Satichaura Ghat where the massacre took place is untouched. I stood on the steps leading down to the river where the doomed women and children waited to climb into the boats and felt grateful for he benign presence of the long line of water buffalo wallowing in the mud.
A pall hung over the sluggish waters. Occasionally a raucous crow flew down and perched on one of the few boats tied up here. I was glad to have seen this terrible, unforgettable place; I was also grateful to get away.
“Your Cliff Richard,” the cheerful guide said again as we parted at Lucknow railway station. “We want him to come back and give a concert. It would be big boost for tourism. You will ask him?”
“I will certainly mention it if I see him,” I promised.
Sunday Telegraph
May 2001