ABSTRACT

INTERVIEWEE NAME: Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner

COLLECTION: 4700.0578

IDENTIFICATION: Britons in pre-Independence India

INTERVIEWER: Frank De Caro, Rosan Jordan

PROJECT: British Voices in South Asia

DATES: 3/8/78 FOCUS DATES: 1930s-1940s

Tape 852, Side A

The railway needed maintenance; before machines, tamping was done by hand; the locomotive department was separate, running sheds; Mrs. Gardener talks about going out on the trooper [?]; she was in a cabin with three other wives while he was in a cabin with the husbands; crazy man started shooting targets with his air pistol; nanny brought washed diapers to hang dry in the women=s cabin but the Captain, upon inspection, threw the diapers out of the portal; inspecting dinners; different dinners for men and women; her mother bought her expensive evening and ball gowns in anticipation of many social events but her husband was a soldier assigned to railways; after arriving, they moved to a rural area called Motta Pur [?] where she was the only English woman; for the first month life was difficult because Richard was away, but she made friends with a few locals who introduced her to Indian culture; Lord Willingdon [?] Anow we know why there is a servant shortage in England@; they had the same servants follow them all around India; no Indians were allowed into Saturday Clubs in Calcutta, but she thinks this is dreadful; the wonderful army in Dehli carrying on; the pitfalls of dividing a country (Pakistan/India/Bangladesh)--many people murdered; Dick=s mother and father had been to India, but her mother=s preconception about attending balls was wrong; after living in the jungle, Mrs. Gardiner abhorred socially elite lifeways; spent time horse-back riding, swimming-- Anot much for a white woman to do@; Indian people looked upon girls as nothing--servants would bring presents to the boys, but not the girls; women not encouraged to get involved in discussions about culture, politics, etc., and not encouraged to get socially involved as women did in England; squatters in Peru lived difficult lives, but it was not permitted to discuss the poverty of Peruvian Indians; hunting at the Christmas shoot and someone shot a panther; the female came out and someone shot her too--Mrs. Gardiner now opposes all hunting; back to the discussion of life on the railway; time-tables, engineers, the locomotive man, general managers; Dick=s job as Inspector of Railways in Burma involved a responsibility to the government and the safety of the railways; he was responsible for the inquiry into accidents where damages exceeded a certain amount of money or where people died; he inspected new signal boxes and rail cars; special inquiries in courts of law, i.e., the Tay [?] Bridge disaster--75 people dead; zinc mine owners near Burma Road had a mineral rail line that he inspected; he later became the Director of Transportation during the war (including railways, rivers, troops, and docks); he raised a railway construction company in Bangalore [?] and also raised troops; the Burma War;

The geographical/geological layout of Peru; the Indian railway system was very efficient, especially because every man concentrated on being a railway man, as opposed to today where unions don=t care about the passengers; being a railway man was a good caste; traveling in the train was quite comfortable; extensive Indian railway system, Dehli to Calcutta took 2.5 days; passengers brought bedding for night journeys; cabins had benches (could sleep four) and a bathroom; meals--either a restaurant car or ate at restaurants in the station; wiring ahead to restaurants, ordinary meals were roast chicken; people took servants with them on trains in first or second class coach although there were railway porters; the question of caste always present in tasks performed by servants, railway porters, etc.; Dick met his wife at Chattham; shooting/hunting; hockey and golf played on sand in India; golf courses called Abrowns@ instead of Agreens@; interviewers and interviewee looking at photos of a trip from Dehli to Agra to Lucknow; dogs were great companions; a photo of a contractor on the CIC was evidence in his investigation, man was paid for work that he did not do; a photo of a pool of water at the Viceroy=s house in Dehli; this house has recently been in the news because the president no longer wants to live there because of its size and vestiges of pageantry; Indians used to love show and pageantry, but the current rulers are ultra socialists; a photo of his bungalow where he lived during his course for inspectors; riding elephants to hunt; shooting panthers and hunting bears; photo of ship; rail bridges across the Ganges River; railway volunteer corps, internal security; making an armored railcar; the revolution (Ghandi) shut down the railway for a week, cut off from Dehli; hill stations designed for wives to go to from April until October, bungalows for rent; men got fortnights to join his family; hill stations for rest and relaxation; they were expected to be members of the club, but the Gardiners only used to club for their facilities, but not for dancing and drinking; the Calcutta Sweep (a race) run by the Calcutta Golf [?] Club; Various clubs (golf, tennis, gun, etc.); in Calcutta, business men made more than service men and thus there weren=t too many army personnel in the social clubs; however in Dehli, where there were a lot of service men who belonged to clubs; railway officer grades had their own clubs, separate from the sergeants=; club life--different types, number of people, differences between clubs in India and in England; Mrs. Gardiner liked the Saturday Club; Burma is less dusty, and thus easier to photograph; they never got malaria becuase they knew how to use a mosquito net; he had jaundice once while traveling with troops; they swam for exercise; an experiment he conducted on locomotives after an accident to test if the design for the locomotive was faulty, description of locomotive and engine set up; railway accident at Dina Pur [?] that involved derailment of the whole train, they found a great deformation of the track that indicated a faulty locomotive. . .unfinished story.