Trumbolosophy

In the earliest stages of the Great War, before British casualties began to assume their calamitous scale, measures were taken to meet the needs of imperial troops, above all ordinary soldiers of the Indian army who were wounded in France. For this purpose the Royal Pavilion in Brighton was turned into a military hospital, and arrangements made there to accommodate the different dietary and other requirements of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim patients. There seems to have been some notion that the architecture of the Prince Regent’s Brighton Pavilion would provide more sympathetic surroundings for these Indian troops, in other words make them feel more at home than the more humdrum surroundings of Rickmansworth or, indeed, the splendours of Cliveden and other ad hoc military hospitals set up in great country houses. One must presume that a more sinister reason was to sequester these men along the colour line. Thus in December 1914, 345 Indian soldiers took up residence at the Brighton P...

I have just finished reading Victoria Glendinning’s excellent recent biography, Raffles and the Golden Opportunity (2012). By a strange coincidence, having lately read James Pope-Hennessy’s Verandah (1964), I was struck by how very alike the two subjects were, though separated by fifty years (as are their respective biographies): Sir Stamford Raffles and Sir John Pope-Hennessy were both self-made (if largely thanks to other, more powerful people’s patronage). They were limitlessly ambitious for themselves and the colonies temporarily placed under their authority (which was more or less total); inclined to act first and seek permission long afterwards (if at all); much given to hopeless quarrels with subordinates and very good at making every other sort of enemy; passionate about liberal causes; enlightened in respect of local languages, ethnicities and customs; careless with public money (and their own), and prone to elicit strong censure from Whitehall — but to...