ABSTRACT

INTERVIEWEE NAME:Colonel and Mrs. C.A.K Innes-Wilson

COLLECTION: 4700.0585

IDENTIFICATION: Britons in pre-Independence India

INTERVIEWER: Frank De Caro, Rosan Jordan

PROJECT: British Voices in South Asia

DATES: 3/29/78 FOCUS DATES: 1930s

Tape 85, Side B

They were married in Calcutta the day before war was declared; Mrs. Innes-Wilson also had connections to India; her great-great grandfather was a general in the Indian Army; her great grandfather was an administrator; her grandfather was a general in the Indian Army; and her father was in the Indian Army and was killed in WWI; she was a teacher and saved money to visit India; she stayed with a friend and to teach their daughter; there is no future in India unless you go into business; their son wasn=t able to join the Indian Army because it no longer existed; she was the only member of her family who wasn=t born in India; her brother was born on the frontier in Chaman; her sister was born in Karachi; she was born in Dover but taken out to Lucknow; she stayed there until 1914 when her father came back with his regiment; she did not return until later, when she met and married Kenneth in Calcutta; she stayed out the war in Calcutta; Kenneth remembers his childhood better than his wife; he was practically brought up by their Indian servants in Bombay Providence, an Indian state; the boy, Linden [?], who succeeded to the throne in that area was educated in England; they were boyhood friends but lost touch until 1935 when they ran into each other in a hotel in Dehra Dun; Linden [?] went back to his state in Bombay and reformed it; he was killed in a swimming pool accident shortly afterwards; his mother was a tutor, which was unusual for a woman to do; his wife taught at a boys prep school; a knowledge of what ancestors had done in India (stories, photo albums);a small circle of families coming out to India generation after generation; types of stories they were told: Indian tales, jungle stories (hunting, observing animals, etc.); Indian-English relations were good; he thinks some Indians were like Englishmen with brown faces; the Indians he knew were sorry to see the British go; Pakistan treated English with more trust than India did; Indians were less concerned with justice than Pakistan; boundary disputes; British role in resolving them; biggest boundary dispute he remembers was in Bangal; the Ganges formed the boundary but had changed its course by several miles over ten years; surveying boundaries, some secretly; the Boundary Commission did not have a geographer because they did not realize their value; river courses and sources made establishing boundaries difficult--this is where the geographer would have been useful; returning to India; he finished his training in 1928 as a second lieutenant and had choices of posts and he chose India; his second choice was West Africa; his third was England; a lot of competition to go to India; some did not want to go and bought their way into another posting; childhood memories, his mother=s stories, and reading (some American books) shaped his expectations of India; Mrs. Innes-Wilson=s grandmother told stories about going to the Hills for the hot season, but she was surprised when she arrived because India was more modern than in past generations= lore; it was more exciting in India than in England, and he was given authority; when he got to the survey he realized his cousin was there; preparation: buying clothes from a well-known outfitter, F.P. Baker in London; they had to buy new clothes once they got to India; tailoring was easy and cheap in India; when people got to India, they were given a teacher; the British Army men looked down on the Indian Army men; Mrs. Innes-Wilson thought she was only going on a trip during the cold weather; she had purchased a return ticket, but decided she was going to stay even if she had not met her husband; she would have taken a job; her mother made her buy a return ticket; most women who were going to meet a future husband did not buy return tickets; unmarried girls stayed with their families; this made for the gay life of big towns like Bombay and Calcutta; before the war, Calcutta had a bumping club life; the large business community enjoyed themselves socially; the clubs were exclusive, snobbish; the Abox swallows@ (businessmen) treated army officers well, so they could live well on a pauper=s salary; it would not have been unusual for women to work in India in jobs like teaching school or tutoring family children [like a governess]; they were married in Ft. William in the afternoon, as is customary in hot weather; as they stepped out of the church they were met by a dispatch rider who told them that all leave for serving officers was canceled; they were going to honeymoon in Kashmir (2000 miles away) and he had given up his accommodation--so there they were on the evening of their reception, full of champagne, with nowhere to go; so they drove around on their honeymoon until they found a house to move into; for Christmas a few months later they stayed outside of Calcutta overnight in a forest/traveler=s bungalow that seemed deserted, but unbeknownst to them the cook that they couldn=t find had been eaten by a tiger; their first passages to India: she remembers coming through the Suez Canal and seeing camels walking along the edge of the canal; she arrived in Bombay where she was met by family friends; she then took a train; to her, train journeys were exciting--the station noise and people hanging on the trains; when he went overseas to Iraq, she was given a free train passage anywhere in India, so she took the longest one possible; she went from north India to south India; when he would go on recruiting trips, he was given first-class passages, but his wife was not; so he solved this by buying two second-class tickets and took her with him; second-class passage allowed them more access to Indian life; story about going into the printing office of the Indian Congress Party and finding them printing pamphlets saying, ADon=t join the British Army to fight in this Imperialist war@; they said to him, AWhat have you come for?@; he said AI=ve come to recruit people to fight in the Imperialist war@; two of them joined; they were looking for lithographic printers for the making of war maps, so they recruited a lot of craftsmen from printing offices all over India.