The myth of the Black Hole of Calcutta

The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta was one that was believed for decades to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but what really happened would appear to be very different from what the history books used to tell.

It was a story that grew from the days of the building of the British Empire, when everyone in Great Britain was convinced that empire-building was the right thing to be doing – spreading civilization and Christianity to the benighted people of far-distant lands. With that mindset, everything that the British did was right and proper and the actions of “lesser” people to frustrate British ambitions had to be wrong and improper. The Black Hole story fits into that scenario very well.

The East India Company

Britain’s early expansion into India was largely due to the actions of the East India Company, which had received its royal charter as far back as 1600. It pursued its aims – of trading in India on terms that were extremely beneficial to British interests – with considerable energy, which included imposing its will by force if necessary. The Company had its own army and navy, and at its peak in the 1850s it had control of more than 250,000 troops and a fleet that was larger than that of the Royal Navy.

By 1756 the East India Company was throwing its weight about in the region around Calcutta (modern Kolkata) and interfering in the internal affairs of the territory ruled by Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. The Company operated from Fort William, its fortified power base in the city.

The Nawab decided to frustrate the Company’s ambitions by launching an attack on Fort William on 20^th June 1756. Seeing what was about to happen, most of the company troops and local recruits deserted the fort and fled, leaving only a token force behind. The fort was therefore easily taken after a short armed struggle, but the Nawab made it clear that he intended no harm to come to the prisoners he had taken. However, the reaction of the prisoners, led by the fort’s commander John Zephaniah Holwell, was far from cooperative so the Nawab ordered that all the Europeans in the fort, including Holwell, should be thrown into its jail briefly as a form of punishment.

The Black Hole Myth

The first element of the myth now comes into play, because the number of prisoners could not have been more than around nine, as opposed to the 146 in the account that reached the history books. In reality, only three of the prisoners died during the night of the incarceration and not the 123 that were claimed as the casualties. The three deaths were not from any mistreatment that they endured but the result of wounds suffered during the previous day’s battle.

The myth was created by John Holwell when he returned to London and put together a report with the title: “A Genuine Narrative of the Deplorable Deaths of the English Gentlemen and Others Who Were Suffocated in the Black Hole”. He was helped in its composition by two other executives of the East India Company who were not witnesses of the event. Holwell could therefore say whatever he liked because he knew full well that nobody would contradict him.

His account was plainly absurd. The room in question measured 18 feet by 14 feet and was therefore physically incapable of holding 146 people. Holwell included lurid details of the agony-twisted faces of the prisoners as they were denied water by their jailers. However, he was right about one thing, which was that the fort’s jail was not called the Black Hole for nothing – it had no windows and only two narrow ventilation slits, so it would have been impossible to see the faces of anyone in the pitch darkness that would have resulted.

But none of this mattered to the British public, who revelled in the horror story and pushed hard for revenge to be taken on the Nawab, who had dared to inflict such an atrocity on British subjects. The worse the atrocity appeared to be, the more likely it was that they would insist on the strongest possible measures.

Enter Robert Clive

Robert Clive has gone down in history as “Clive of India”, being the general most responsible for winning the battles and skirmishes that brought huge swathes of the subcontinent under British control. He had joined the army of the East India Company as a young man and risen rapidly through the ranks, although his reputation for bravery and skillful command may have been ill-deserved, given his use of trickery and cruelty to gain his objectives.

At all events, he was the man to whom the East India Company turned in order to sort out the problem of the Nawab of Bengal. Clive had little difficulty in recapturing Fort William and then went on to defeat the Nawab at the Battle of Plassey.

Clive used his time in India to enrich himself and acquire large amounts of loot from the various rulers that he defeated. When he finally returned to England he was challenged by Parliament to explain his vast wealth and justify his apparently underhand methods but was completely exonerated. In the end, winning an Empire for Great Britain was justification enough.

Challenging the Myth

It took a very long time for the Black Hole story to be properly challenged and exposed for the lie that it was. The first rebuttal did not come until 1915 with a paper entitled “The Black Hole: The Question of Holwell’s Veracity”, by the secretary of the Calcutta Historical Society. Other investigations were to follow. However, such was the power of the original story that it is still widely believed today, despite its impossibility.

The Black Hole of Calcutta is just one of many examples of “fake news” from past centuries. Telling huge lies has often proved to be profitable, especially when they are believed by enough people. Under search circumstances, why bother telling the truth?

© John Welford

The ironic history of Empire Windrush

On 21^st June 1948 a ship arrived at Tilbury Docks, near London, that was to enter history. On board Empire Windrush were 1027 passengers from the West Indies (most were from Jamaica and Trinidad) who were about to start a new life in Britain.

They were not the first West Indian migrants to make the journey across the Atlantic – two other ships had brought immigrants in 1947 – but Empire Windrush was destined to enter the public imagination and lead to the creation of what has become known as the “Windrush Generation”.

What is perhaps less generally appreciated is that there was a supreme irony in the fact that this particular ship was to achieve fame by this means. Empire Windrush had a past that few would have known even at the time, let alone now.

The ship was built in Hamburg in 1930, as MV Monte Rosa, and was owned by Nazi Germany. It was originally a cruise ship that – between 1933 and 1939 – took German families on holiday cruises as part of the Nazi “Strength Through Joy” programme. All the people who went on festive jaunts aboard the ship would have been sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and preference would have given to party members.

One can be absolutely certain that none of MV Monte Rosa’s early passengers were Jewish or black, and the flag that fluttered proudly above them was the Nazi swastika.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939 MV Monte Rosa was requisitioned as a troopship, and it was used to ferry German soldiers to Norway for the Nazi invasion of that country. On return trips from Norway the ship did carry Jews – who were on their way to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Efforts were made by the British to sink MV Monte Rosa but they failed. However, the ship was captured by the British in 1945 and became a troopship for the British instead of the Germans, and with a new name.

The famous voyage in 1948 was not originally intended to carry the passengers that it did. Empire Windrush was en route from Australia to England and called at Kingston, Jamaica, to pick up British servicemen who were due to take home leave. There was still plenty of space on board, so advertisements were placed to see if any local people wanted to take advantage of the recently passed British Nationality Act that granted all citizens of the British Empire the right to settle in Great Britain. The rest, as they say, is history.

Empire Windrush continued in government service until March 1954, when it sank in the Mediterranean Sea after an explosion and fire in the engine room. Four crew members were killed in the explosion, but all the remaining crew and passengers (soldiers and their families) were rescued.

It was therefore a combination of chance factors that led to the irony of a ship built to further bizarre notions of white racial purity becoming a symbol of Britain’s post-war transformation into a multiracial, multicultural society.

©John Welford

Attitutes towards the British Empire

Every year, in September, the series of Promenade Concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall reaches its last night and Britain suddenly rediscovers its patriotism. These days, we Brits are not much given to flag waving, but on the Last Night of the Proms (which is now extended to simultaneous events around the country and is broadcast live on TV and radio) there are flags a-plenty and enthusiastic renditions of patriotic songs including these lines from “Land of Hope and Glory”:

“Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set / God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet”.

Anyone from overseas who saw the crowds of mainly young people belting out these lines to the music of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March No 1” might imagine that the British people continue to be imperialist and jingoistic, nostalgically longing for the revival of Empire and seeking world domination once more. However, nobody should take these celebrations too seriously, because today’s Brits have a very different world-view from that of their great-grandparents who were around when those words were written back in 1902.


The red map

The British Empire was at its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was when maps of the world showed the largest proportion of the world’s territories coloured red. To the top left was Canada, to the bottom right, Australia. Other large red blocks included India and huge swathes of Africa. Island chains strung across the Pacific ensured that this was truly an empire “on which the sun never set”. At the centre of the map was the relatively tiny island of Great Britain, from which this whole enterprise was run. It is hardly to be wondered that the vast majority of the British people once took enormous pride in being the most powerful country in the world.

An important element of this pride, and one that is often forgotten, is that the Victorians regarded the Empire not only as proof of their superiority but as something that it was their sacred duty to maintain and extend. In 1893, Lord Rosebery, who was Foreign Secretary and would become Prime Minister, said in a speech that:

“We have to consider what countries must be developed … and we have to remember that it is part of our heritage to take care that the world, as far as it can be moulded by us, shall receive an English-speaking complexion and not that of other nations. [We must not] decline to take our share in a partition of the world, which we have not forced, but which has been forced on us.”

In terms of Africa and India, Britain was shouldering the “white man’s burden” of rescuing benighted peoples from the despair of being primitive, savage, un-Christian, and black-skinned. Seen from a modern perspective, this attitude was deeply racist, patronising and indeed hypocritical, in that the purpose of Empire was to receive as well as give.


Pros and cons of Empire

However, many British people at the time would not have regarded the Empire as being anything other than a force for good. They genuinely believed that their Christian religion required them to make converts of all the races of the world, and also that the white races were inherently superior to the black ones. (It is probably worth bearing in mind that there are still plenty of people around who think the same way.) Through the Empire, the Victorians and Edwardians were able to put these beliefs into practice. Their God, together with their finely-tuned Protestant work ethic, required them to serve, and the Empire gave them the opportunity to do so.

The Empire therefore affected the British people in very practical ways. Many thousands of Brits from the higher strata of society went out to remote parts of the world as colonial civil servants, military leaders, engineers, teachers, missionaries, doctors and merchants. Novels such as E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India”, and the stories of Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling, give very vivid portrayals of the lives these people led. There was also plenty of work for people from the lower classes, most notably as the foot soldiers who fought a long series of colonial wars right through the reign of Queen Victoria. Most of these people came home after a few years of service, but others settled permanently in the colonies, such as the owners of vast agricultural estates in Africa and tea plantations in India.

On the home front, many thousands of British people owed their livelihood to the Empire. The city of Birmingham became known as the “workshop of the world” for its manufacture of machinery and other goods that were exported largely to the colonies. New industries sprang up to process the raw materials and foodstuffs that were imported, such as rubber from Malaya and tea from India. Thousands of sailors, dockers and merchants made the import/export trade possible, and thousands more built the ships that carried the goods.

However, the British Empire was always a two-edged sword. Along with the benefits of Empire there were many reasons why Britain now looks back on it with shame as well as pride. It cannot be denied that massive injustices were done in the name of the Empire, and millions died in military actions, acts of genocide, and epidemics introduced to populations that had no defence to Western diseases. In the later Empire, the British governed without slavery, but servitude took its place, often harshly imposed. That said, British rule tended to be less brutal than that of some other colonial powers, most notably Belgium in the Congo.


The morality of Empire

This leaves aside the moral dimension of colonialism. Setting out to populate an empty land and wrest a living from a place that had never previously supported human life is one thing, but is it justifiable to, in effect, steal someone else’s country, maybe fighting the native people and killing many of them in the process? If you then impose your rule on the natives, insist on them adopting your religion and culture, and make them subservient to a monarch thousands of miles away, how can that possibly be justified?

In many cases, that is precisely what the builders of the British Empire did, and this process had an effect on the people back home as well as those in the new colonies. When you, as a nation, consider yourselves to be superior to other peoples, and to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth, you begin to think not only that you can do no wrong, but that you are a better human being than the colonized natives, who become seen as a sub-species of humanity who deserve the oppression that you are meting out to them. You begin to believe that these people can be enslaved because that is, after all, how they would treat each other, and that it is God’s will that you do so. In time, you, as the superior human, will become corrupted as your immoral acts and attitudes turn into moral ones in your own eyes.


Multicultural Britain

Today’s Brits look back at the days of Empire with mixed emotions. Apart from the fake patriotism mentioned at the beginning of this article, there is still a certain amount of pride in some quarters, but shame in others. The consequences of Empire are still with us today, in the form of the millions of our citizens whose parents or grandparents reversed the process and settled in Britain, mainly for economic reasons. Many of our cities have large non-white populations, and some will soon have a majority of their population who are not genetically native.

Multiculturalism has led to tensions and problems, and even riots at times. Most “natives” are happy to live in a rainbow nation, and to eat Indian takeaways and take part in the festivals that the immigrants have brought with them. However, others find this difficult, and there is therefore a considerable amount of racial prejudice that has led to race-hate crimes and accusations of “institutional racism” on the part of the Police and other organizations. Political parties that are racist, whether they admit it or not, enjoy periods of considerable support (although this is by no means the case at all times). Had the British Empire never existed, it is highly unlikely that Britain would be a multicultural nation today.


The Commonwealth

Although the British Empire as such has long gone, the Commonwealth that succeeded it is still in existence, presided over by Queen Elizabeth II. It still has some influence on world affairs but, apart from the spectacle of the four-yearly Commonwealth Games, it has little impact on the life of the average Briton. There is still a handful of colonies left, such as Pitcairn Island and St Helena, and we have even fought a colonial war in living memory, to defend the Falkland Islands against Argentina in 1982. However, apart from these occasional reminders of Empire, the effect of the British Empire on today’s British people is indirect. The same could hardly be said of past generations.

© John Welford