Khaki Mischief. The Agra Murder Case

228 Pages·2014·5.76 MB·English

by  Molly Whittington-Egan

KHAKI MISCHIEF
The Agra Murder Case
Molly Whittington-Egan
www.nwp.co.uk
For my mother and my husband
Acknowledgements
My gratitude to the family of the late Henry Hope, who have helped and
encouraged me by the gift of the results of their research into their background,
and by their interest and enthusiasm.
My gratitude to Jonathan Goodman, whose generous gift of an introduction to
that family, after they had contacted him on reading his Posts-Mortem, so greatly
enriched my own work.
Special thanks to Mary Neilson, Brigadier R. B. Scott, D.S.O., and David
Ward, for conversations about British India.
I am indebted also to
Hilary Bailey;
I. A. Baxter, India Office Records, The British Library; Annabel Carey;
Ealing Public Library, Mattock Lane; The Editor, Standard Twentieth Century
Dictionary: Urdu into English; J. H. H. Gaute;
Paul Guy, British Library Document Supply Centre; Malvern Library;
Jerry Mullaney, for photographic expertise; Rajkeeya Public Library,
Allahabad; Records Branch, Department of Social Security, Newcastle;
Reverend Mother, Loreto House, Calcutta; John Sinkins, Wildy’s, Lincoln’s
Inn; Alison West, Suffolk Record Office; Christian Wright, National Library
of Scotland; D. Wyn Evans, The University Library, Exeter;
and to my husband, Richard Whittington-Egan, éminence grise of matters
criminous, whose experience, and library, were always at my disposal.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
One The Pilot’s Daughter
Two A Brother Mason
Three Tonic Powders
Four The Cook’s Tale
Five Bad Omens
Six Heat-stroke
Seven Poor Little Me
Eight Eyeless in Agra
Nine Badmashes
Ten The Red Gleam
Eleven Indian Justice
Twelve Svengali Lives!
Thirteen Budhu Sings
Fourteen Doctor Gore Testifies
Fifteen Till Death
Sixteen Under the Neem Tree
Seventeen The Pilot’s Grandson
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Plates
The pilot’s salty colleagues: E. F. Hudson and R. Rust, Branch Pilots in the
Bengal Pilot Service with Augusta’s father
Babu Denoo Nath Mookerjee: one of the capable clerks who administered the
Bengal Pilot Service
The pilot’s daughter: Augusta Fairfield Fullam
Edward McKeon Fullam: unwanted ‘hubby’
Kathleen, the Fullams’ daughter
Lieutenant Henry Lovell William Clark, Indian Subordinate Medical
Department
Henry Clark: brother Mason, and a busy man of affairs
The geography of the affair
The Agra Club now: a carefully preserved time capsule
The Agra Club: interior with stuffed tiger
Budhu: Clark’s servant
Ram Lai: greengrocer
Mohan was a bharboonja
Edward Fullam’s burial record, bearing false cause of death, as certified by
Lieutenant Clark
The High Court at Allahabad: scene of the trials
Augusta Fullam’s burial record, showing the ironic cause of death
The Pilot’s grandson: Henry William Hope, son of Augusta Fullam and Henry
Clark
In text
Table of poisons purchased by Clark
Facsimile of Augusta’s letter to the Joint Magistrate
Chapter One
The Pilot’s Daughter
It was a hot evening in Agra, and the little girl, aged nine, lay awake in the
sweltering bungalow at 9 Metcalfe Road. Outside, in the compound,
undergrowth rustled and shapes slithered, while the fever-bird called in a rising
crescendo, ‘Are you ill? Are you ill? Brain fever! Brain fever!’
Kathleen was suspicious, and she was watching. Her father had been sick—
again—and had gone to bed. Through the open doorway of her bedroom, she
had an oblique, partial view of the dining-room. Two grown-up figures were
passing back and forth: her mother and her mother’s friend, a doctor.
She saw the doctor’s hand take a red box from a shelf. Then—let Kathleen
speak; her voice is small and innocent, but precise, deadly—‘He opened the box
and brought out a glass needle and opened a paper which he also took from the
shelf. He poured out some white powder in a wine-glass and poured some water
in it. He put the needle into the glass and then pulled it up.’
Next—and the witness who had been underestimated, discounted, could still
see through the doorway—‘He took the glass needle into my father’s room, and
poked it into his heart and his arm and his shoulder. I thought it was a very cruel
thing to do.’
The doctor went back into the dining-room, and her father was left alone.
After about a minute, he began to make a funny, gargling noise.
The little girl stole out of bed in her long, white nightdress and stood beside
her father as he lay on his back, gargling, until he was quiet. But she did not
know death when she saw it, even though she had lived all her short life in India,
where death lurks in varied guise around any corner.
Back to her bed she crept, and kept watch. Presently, the doctor returned to
the stilled man and felt his hand. It was only then, when he said one word
—‘Gone’—that Kathleen understood. There was no sound of crying from her
mother.
Agra* was a black time, but once—before Agra, before the doctor came—
there had been bright, white days in Meerut, where, in 1908, when the drama
begins, Edward and Augusta Fullam lived with their three children.
Meerut was a museum of bad memories for the British. Lest they should
forget the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which began there during Sunday morning
service, certain bungalows bore a plaque inscribed with the chilling message that
‘Here Mrs Smith-Smith and her four children were killed and thrown down a
well.’† Not surprisingly, some of these marked bungalows were reputed to be
haunted. Sensitive English dogs howled and shunned them.
Buried not too deeply in the collective memory lay the nice detail that the Mrs
Smith-Smiths had been ravished with batons of burning tow. On Sunday
mornings, in weekly commemoration of a time of fatal British unpreparedness,
troops filed into church equipped with their sidearms and rifles, and deposited
them into special slots designed for that purpose.
None of these associations disturbed the Fullams, snug in their spacious
bungalow at 33 Warwick Row. Augusta loved Meerut. Every day, Edward
cycled off to his office and she was deliciously free to indulge in the trivial
pursuits of the minor memsahib who was not burdened with a social conscience.
Augusta ran her household in the style that was expected of her. The entire
story that follows is set against the listening, muttering background of white-
robed native servants. Somehow, the bashful British managed to cope with the
lack of privacy—often, as Mrs Montgomery in J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday
would advise, by pretending that the Indians did not exist.
Shuffling, bare-footed figures—far too many of them—whisked round comers
unexpectedly and were fond of crouching on the back verandah, within hearing
of the matrimonial bed. In some homes, during the dreaded Hot Weather, the
man who pulled the string of the punkah fan suspended over the bed was
stationed actually inside the bedroom.
Each separate bungalow, exposed and baking in its own compound, was as
open as a film-set. The servants were linked by threads in the web of caste and
kin to the shadow households of servants which backed up all the other British
establishments. It was impossible to opt out of the grapevine of gossip, and
anyone who chose to behave in a manner that would cause comment was obliged
to balance the value of the indulgence against the consequences of its
broadcasting.
The modest Fullam ménage, an unpretentious set-up, as befitted their social
position, was quite imposing enough: bearer, cook, ayah for the children,
gardener, water-carrier, part-time washerman, and lowly sweeper, who saw to
the thunder-box. A syce tended the one horse kept to draw the light fitton, or
phaeton, which was Augusta’s main form of transport. She was no rider; her
heritage was far from that of the full-blown memsahib who rode to hounds, side-
saddle, on jackal hunts, or set off on jungle safari. Mick was the family dog. It
was the done thing to keep an English dog, especially a smooth-coated fox-
terrier or a bull-terrier, even though the most cherished pet was very likely to
catch rabies from some starved pye-dog.
India was not a bad way of life, as long as your health lasted. Wife and
children of some classes* could be packed off to the Hills for the worst of the
Hot Weather, and the husband, if he were so placed, could join them for periods
of leave.
But outside the whitewashed walls of the compound, the wild Plains were
waiting to invade the watered lawns and the tubs of nostalgic country-garden
flowers. Unless the vegetation was constantly cut back, deadly snakes, unseen,
would boldly scale the verandah, lurk under rugs and cushions, and pop up
through bathroom outlets.
The mysterious, pungent, jangling, scheming bazaar was never far away.
Thuggee was over, but dacoits abounded. Death lay in a sunbeam, in a pink
sweetmeat—or in a woman’s heart.
*
Augusta Fairfield Fullam was probably—not certainly—of pure British
descent. Sir Cecil Walsh, an Appeal Court Judge of India, the author of the only
previous volume on this case, said without qualification that she was ‘English’—
and he was placed to be particularly sensitive to nuances of class and race. ‘She
was superior,’ he wrote, ‘probably in birth, certainly in education and intellect,
to the other three actors in this drama.’
However, the author has had sight of a confidential document which describes
her as ‘Anglo-Indian’. The matter is not straightforward. Before 1900, those of
mixed blood in India were called ‘Eurasians’, and the British were ‘Anglo-
Indians’. The Eurasians disliked the distinction, and in 1900 it was officially
decreed that, thenceforth, Eurasians were to be termed Anglo-Indians. The
British of the old school, in their turn, resented this change, and carried on
calling themselves ‘Anglo-Indian’. The confusion thus caused persists to this
day.
The high Official who, some years after 1900, completed the form, himself
British, might have automatically scrawled in ‘Anglo-Indian’ without checking
the small print, which is actually extremely specific, viz: ‘Nationality (i.e.,
European, Anglo-Indian, Indian, etc. If European, state special country).’ There
is no doubt that Augusta’s father, Leonard Peirson Goodwyn, was English. Born
in Suffolk, he was baptised on 4th November, 1836, son of Edmund Goodwyn,
gentleman farmer, later High Constable, of Framlingham. Edmund and his wife,
Eliza, baptised thirteen other children between the years 1833 and 1851. Leonard
was third in line. Perhaps the first-born son, Edmund, was the ultimate heir to
the yeoman land. Leonard looked to the Empire for his future. Confirmation of
his Englishness—if confirmation were needed—comes from the fact that he
became a member of the Bengal Pilot Service, and, at the time when he joined,
the pilots were recruited in England. The service was not open to Indians until