A Maverick Surgeon, RMS Titanic, The Witch's Ladder & More

It's spring, and that can only mean one thing—the latest edition of Vintage Script is out, full of little joys to be unwrapped and devoured. As well as a time of anniversaries, this season is one of reminiscence, discovery and a look forward to delights to come. Here's a quick taste of what's on offer.

The Work Is Not God's
Richard Smyth

A Gothic tale, this one—not for the fainthearted. If you like anatomy and have a taste for the macabre, this is a story for you. Richard's vivacious prose transports you right to the very point where blade meets flesh.

The Unsinkable Rose Ellen Murray
Kirsty Lee
We all think we know the Titanic story, says Kirsty, but there are as many mysteries about it as there were lost lives. Here we meet an imaginative "survivor" of the disaster with a penchant for sea travel (and storytelling), despite an unfortunate propensity to sink a ship.

I Remember Harry Bagnall
Bill Carr
A poignant love story, set in Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne, at the outset of the First World War. 950 men from Byker alone were killed in the war, and Bill here pays tribute to lives loved and lost.

The Age Of Wood
Max Adams
Max tells us the story of wood, and the people who have worked it through the ages. It's a delightful reminder that that woodlands are a vital resource for raw materials, for history and for stories.

The Age Of Wood

The Flying Boy
Edward Clark

Inspired by an old photo, Edward recalls the long, hot summer days of his youth spent at the open-air pool. His writing makes you believe that the Flying Boy of the title could jump out of the page before you, and you really can smell the chlorine and feel the heat rising up from the flagstones.

Exhibit M.218-1978
Joanne Ogden
The centrepiece of this story is a brooch of enamelled gold, whose secret brings about a satisfying conclusion to a gripping tale. It's a delicate thing that proves powerful in troubled times.

A Knock At The Door
David Williams
This extract from David's novel Mr Stephenson's Regret gives us an insight into the private lives of railway pioneers George and Robert Stephenson. Fame and fortune may have come later in life for George, but here David—a fluent and sensitive writer—gives us a sense of the struggles he faced as a father, son, brother and man.

George Stephenson

William's War
Mavis Lee

Mavis has created a collage here from letters, postcards, programmes and other snippets that her grandfather, William, sent or brought back from the First World War. The details are touching—he tells of how he clung to a raft for over six hours after his ship was torpedoed, and talks later of the souvenirs he hopes to return with. And there's a happy ending too...

Chewing Gum
Sue Mackrell
Sue has happy memories of visiting her aunt's sweet shop in South Wales, and her tale vividly recalls the fusty shop and the treasures therein—Rainbow Drops, Flying Saucers and Everlasting Toffee. It will strike a chord with anyone who remembers the joy of a paper bag laden with their favourite sweet treats.

1912 Overture
Kim Charleston
Not only is this year the centenary of the Titanic disaster, but also that of the death of Bram Stoker. Here Kim deftly combines the two in a series of letters from one of his domestics. The parallel strands of the story remind us that where there is hope and imagination, there is also frailty and tragedy.

Bram Stoker's famous book

A Stroke Of Luck?
Michael Montagu
Michael turns "genetic detective" here to trace the medical history of his famous family—kings of Scotland and England descended from the House of Stuart. Fascinatingly, he reveals that Charles II most likely died from acute mercury poisoning—he was a keen scientist, it seems, and loved nothing better than a session of experimenting with mercury in his lab...

The Witch's Ladder
Claire Fuller
A witch's ladder made with cock's feathers and human hair...could it at once cause a destructive inferno and bring the best of good fortune to its victims' neighbours? Read Claire's story and decide for yourself...

The spring edition of Vintage Script is on sale now.

No blog post next week...Vintage Script will be en route for our new HQ in Suffolk. Normal service to resume week commencing 7 May...catch you then!

Punjab’s Last—And Suffolk’s First—Maharajah

It may surprise you to know that Elveden, a village just inside the Suffolk border to the north, was once home to the Punjab’s last maharajah, Duleep Singh (1838-1893). That is, unless you have the good fortune to step inside his former home, Elveden Hall, where the central hall is fashioned of white marble, and where eastern motifs sit happily alongside classical forms. The story of how the Maharajah ended up in rural Suffolk is—like many good stories— full of intrigue, loss, hope and tragedy.

The Maharajah became ruler of the Punjab aged just five but when the area was proclaimed part of the British Empire in 1849, he was deposed and forced to live in restricted circumstances at first in India, then exiled to England aged 13. The dethroning had been brutal. Property—the centrepiece being the spectacular Koh-i-Noor diamond, to this day part of the Crown Jewels—was confiscated, the lad was separated from his mother, his unshorn hair was cut and he converted to Christianity, one imagines under duress.

The Maharajah Duleep Singh

The Maharajah lived at first in London, where he moved in royal circles and soon became a favourite of Queen Victoria. She is reported to have said of him, ‘Those eyes and those teeth are too beautiful’. A tour of Europe was followed by an episode living in Scotland, where it seems he developed a taste for parties and Highland attire. He returned briefly to India in 1860 to bring his mother back to live with him north of the border (and went back to his homeland only once again, this time to inter her ashes), returning to England after she died, and living a while in Yorkshire before settling in 1863 on the Elveden Estate, Suffolk, bought for him by the India Office.

Elveden Hall, Suffolk

I can imagine why the Maharajah felt at home there. The flat, arable lands of Suffolk could easily be twinned with the fertile plains of the Punjab; just swap sugar beet, potatoes and rye for mangoes, oranges and cotton. (Today the Pakistani Punjab produces 68 per cent of the country’s grain production, while 85 per cent of the Indian Punjab is under cultivation. Meanwhile, the Elveden Estate alone is one of the largest farms in the country, and its biggest producer of rye.) But there is something more tenuous than that, something in the way, on a summer’s evening, the setting sun envelopes the Suffolk landscape in a golden light reminiscent of a land even further east.

By all accounts, the Maharajah threw himself heart and soul into Suffolk life, displaying the jollity and joie de vivre that Punjabis have always been famous for. The red brick Georgian Elveden Hall was remodelled to resemble the elaborate Mughal palaces of his memory—the four-storey high Marble Hall and cupola its centrepiece. Breathtaking—as much for its luminescence as for the surprise of finding royal Punjab in the heart of East Anglia. Philanthropic, too, the Maharajah regenerated the estate’s buildings, including the church, school and cottages, and transformed it into an efficient game reserve, with this function still going strong today. (The Maharajah was known as the fourth best shot in England.)

The Marble Hall at Elveden

Family life was productive. In 1864 the Maharajah married Bamba Müller, the illegitimate daughter of a German banker and his Abyssinian mistress who had been cared for by Christian missionaries in Cairo. They had three sons and three daughters, who were brought up at Elveden. It appears at first glance that the Maharajah had made a happy life for himself.

But home is where the heart is, and he had plenty of time to contemplate the forced separation from his native land and religion and plan his return. In 1886 the British government decreed that he should not return to India nor re-embrace Sikhism, but still the Maharajah with his family set sail for home in March of that year and got as far as Aden, Yemen, where he was arrested. The family returned to England but the Maharajah did not return with them. He reconverted to Sikhism and in July travelled to Paris, where he spent most of the rest of his life, concocting a series of failed attempts to liberate India from the British Empire and reclaim his former glory in the Punjab.

Maharani Bamba died in 1887, and the Maharajah went on to marry Ada Douglas Wetherill, reported to have previously been his mistress. Their marriage produced two daughters. Sadly, none of his eight offspring had children themselves, and so the royal lineage died with them.

Maharajah Duleep Singh died in Paris aged 55 in 1893. His body was not returned to India as he wished, but laid to rest in a Christian burial at Elveden Church. His executors sold the hall to Edward Guinness, the First Earl of Iveagh, and the estate remains in the hands of the family today.

The Maharajah's gravestone

The Maharajah’s story is fascinating and multi-faceted, and deserves a far deeper analysis than I can provide here. His story seems to encapsulate the fate of so many individuals in India as it succumbed to the British Empire, and even up to and beyond Partition in 1947 it has been retold time and time again—the tragedy of former glory, surrender, loss, attempted restoration and the poignancy of death far from home. And despite the Maharajah’s (understandable) love for his little corner of Suffolk, I am certain that it is the Punjab that is etched deeply in his heart.

With thanks to Rachel Power for her insights.

The Pestilence of Blaydon and Other Great Plagues

‘To the primary care centre being troubled by my sickness whereupon, to my great grief, no cure was offered; only the taking of newts’ livers and a poultice of pigeon feathers. And so home through the streets of Blaydon where the men and women do wheeze and splutter, which troubled me greatly. And so to bed.’

You could easily be forgiven for thinking that the above is a quote from that great diarist Samuel Pepys, in reference to the Great Plague of the 1660s. But no, ’tis an extract from my own journal of the year 2012, describing the ghastly plague which has just assaulted Blaydon-on-Tyne. Despite my weakened state as one of its unfortunate victims, it got me thinking about the events of the plague outbreaks of the Middle Ages and beyond and their effect on society.

The most notorious episode of plague was The Black Death, which peaked in Europe between 1348 and 1350. At the time it was known as the “Great Plague” or “Great Pestilence” and it was not until the sixteenth century that the term “Black Death” came into use. There is something morbidly fascinating about this title. Did it refer to the blackened swellings present in the end-stage of the bubonic form (it also came in pneumonic and septicaemic varieties) of the disease and the subsequent gangrene? For some perverse reason, I wish it did. But no, apparently it referred to the sense of Armageddon that the disease inspired. And quite rightly, for it killed off up to 60 per cent of Europe’s population and 100 million people worldwide. One contemporary source reported: ‘They died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in ditches…and covered in earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura…buried my five children with my own hands…And so many died that many believed it was the end of the world’.

It was believed to originate in China, and was carried along the Silk Road and other trade routes on the fleas that populated black rats. (But note that archaeologist Barney Sloane last year claimed in his book The Black Death in London that the plague spread so fast in London that its carriers had to be humans, not rats.) It penetrated England on the south coast in June 1348, and by spring 1350 had travelled as far north as Scotland. The Death struck swiftly, most victims expiring between two and seven days after infection. Symptoms included the aforementioned swellings (or “buboes”), fever, delirium, muscular pain and the vomiting of blood. Jeuan Gethin, a Welsh poet, eloquently describes the dreaded symptoms of the plague here: ‘We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy or fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit; it is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of an ashy colour. It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste. It is a grievous ornament that breaks out in a rash. The early ornaments of a black death’.

Plague victims afflicted by buboes

There was no cure for the plague, and the most that could be done to alleviate suffering was to apply herbal remedies for the symptoms, treat the lanced swellings with poultices which included ingredients as bizarre as dried toads, or even strap live chickens to them, or blood-letting—not a pleasant task as the exiting blood was thick, black and offensive.

Flagellants sought to appease God and curtail the course of the plague by whipping themselves in public. Wearing white robes, dragging crosses and brandishing sticks with spiked tails, this sight may have been as alarming as that of the suffering of the plague victims themselves.

Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger

But still the population fell in great numbers. The dead were buried in overflowing trenches, houses containing bodies (some still alive) were burned to the ground and corpses were left where they had died in the street. William of Dene, from Rochester, wrote, ‘…men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard’.

What did this destruction mean for the course of history? In short, a diminished population and therefore workforce increased the value of manpower and these factors played a part in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. While immediately after The Black Death peasants were in a strong position to demand better conditions, the Statute of Labourers passed in 1351 sought to curtail these claims. Enforcement of the statute was one of several triggers for the uprising. The labour shortage also meant that farming had to change and other industries—for example the wool industry—sprang up. And how could people maintain their blind faith in the church, when a disaster of such biblical proportions had befallen them, and when the church’s reaction was to sell “indulgences” to take away sin but salted the funds away to construct shiny new buildings, or distort the concept out of recognition so that you could cleanse yourself of all past sins? Again, The Black Death and its impact sparked a chain reaction that later manifested itself in the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

The plague recurred in Europe throughout the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Samuel Pepys chronicled The Great Plague of 1664-1666, the last significant outbreak of plague in England, in his diary. I find these extracts fascinating:

‘June 7^th 1665
... it being the hottest day that ever I felt in my life, and it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in England in the beginning of June—we to the New Exchange and there drunk whey; with much entreaty, getting it for our money, and would not be entreated to let us have one glasse more...This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there—which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell to and chaw—which took away the apprehension.

‘August 16th 1665
It was dark before I could get home; and so land at church-yard stairs, where to my great trouble I met a dead Corps, of the plague, in the narrow ally, just bringing down a little pair of stairs - but I thank God I was not much disturbed at it. However, I shall beware of being late abroad again.’

Samuel Pepys

Although concentrated in London, this plague did spread to other parts of the country. It is believed that by the time of The Great Fire of London in 1666, when the tightly-packed slums where disease spread easily were destroyed, the plague had begun to wind down. It left an estimated 100,000 people dead.

Still remnants of The Black Death walk among us—the bacterium hasn’t changed much in the last 600 years, a recent study by Museum of London Archaeology tells us. That’s a good thing as it means that modern-day antibiotics are an effective treatment as they don’t have to fret about it mutating all the time, like influenza. And thank goodness modern medicine has indeed moved on from the misuse of amphibian and fowl: today 85 per cent of plague victims survive, compared to the almost 100 per cent mortality rate for The Black Death. And so I resolve to stop feeling sorry for myself as I shake off the dregs of The Blaydon Pestilence, and to embrace the fresh post-equinox air, and to live merrily, and to write a more uplifting post next time!