We last met James Clifford Hall in 1837, the year of his father’s death when he was only three years old. The following pages describe briefly the main family events in the 33 years between the time of his father’s death and his visit to England in 1870, when he met his cousin George. They give one some idea of the perils of living in India in the middle of the 19th Century.
On 12th July 1842, his mother Ann married again. Her second husband was Thomas Burrowes who, like her first husband, was a Sub-conductor. He was aged 41 and had recently been widowed. Their marriage certificate shows that Ann had become the Matron of the Central School after the death of her first husband.
In 1846 Ann had a daughter, Mary Jane, followed by a son, Henry, in 1847; and another daughter, Lucy, in 1848. The next family event we know about is the marriage, in October 1949 of her eldest daughter, Frances Elizabeth, to a William Selwood Hewett, a Lieutenant in the 11th Regiment of Native Infantry. Frances, like her mother, married at the age of 14. Her husband, aged 24, was the son of an army officer who had died in the 1830’s, while in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The Hewetts were a merchant family from Doncaster. A year later Frances had a daughter, Sarah Elizabeth, making Ann a grandmother at the age of 34. Ann then went on to become a mother again herself in 1850 and 1854. On each occasion she had a son. They were named William and Alexander. On the 29 April 1856 Thomas Burrowes died of cholera and Ann was widowed for the second time. A fortnight later she lost the younger son of her new family, Alexander George. She was now aged 40.
The death of her second husband may be a suitable moment to summarise the composition and circumstances of Ann Burrowes’s family. Of the four children of her first marriage to James Frederick Hall, a son and a daughter were still living. The son, James Clifford, was 23 and had just joined the Revenue Department as a trainee Surveyor in the Guzerat Revenue Survey. The daughter Frances Elizabeth, now 21, had three surviving children of her own, and was living in Bombay, where her husband was serving as Adjutant to the Marine Battalion of his regiment.
From her second marriage to Thomas Burrows, Ann had four surviving children, Mary, Henry, Lucy and William. They were aged 10, 9, 8 and 6 years old respectively and were therefore still dependent on their mother. To support this young family she had a pension of 150 rupees a year from the East India Company, which in today’s money (2004) would be the equivalent of about £1000 a year, however perhaps a more useful comparison might be that it was about a fifth of what her son was earning as a junior civil servant. By modern standards she had had a hard life. Widowed twice, she had borne nine children, three of whom had predeceased her and for nearly ten years she had had to bring up a young family without the support of a husband. However by the mid 1860’s life must have appeared to be getting better. James Hall was doing well in his career with the Revenue Department and had been promoted to the rank of Assistant Superintendent, with a salary of 750 rupees a year. William Hewett, her son-in-law, was now a Major and had a good staff appointment at the military headquarters at Mhow, 300 miles NE of Bombay. Her Burrowes’ children were all nearly grown up and in 1863 her eldest daughter from this family, Mary Jane, had married Edward Flower who had a good job with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Co. He was obviously an enterprising young man as within a few years he had left the Railway and set himself up as a house agent and stockbroker.
However the year of 1865 saw three more family deaths. In August Mary Jane Flower died of jaundice in Poona, leaving Edward with a one year old son; and a month later Frances Hewett died of a violent haemorrhage in Mhow, leaving William with a family of five, whose ages ranged from 4 to 15. The third death was that of Ann herself. She had died in Middle Colaba, Bombay on the 31st March. The timing of her death spared her mourning the loss of her two daughters, but perhaps even more importantly she escaped witnessing the tragic fate of her eldest son, James Clifford.
We must now return to the main participant in our story, James Clifford Hall. When his mother died in 1865 James had been a Revenue Surveyor for nearly ten years. For most of this time he had worked in the native state of Guzarat, which lay about 250 miles north of Bombay.
The post of Survey Officer in the Revenue Department was a responsible position as a large part of government revenue was raised by some form of land tax. The Survey Officer not only surveyed the land, marked the boundaries and registered the occupants, he also fixed the amount of tax to be paid by each occupant taking into account other factors such as the quality of the soil, availability of water and local communications. Having completed his work he left it to the Collector to carry out the unpopular task of collecting the money. James’s career seems to have progressed satisfactorily. At the time of his mother’s death he was an Assistant Superintendent and by 1872 was a Superintendent. In 1873 he was seconded to special duty in the native states of Guzerat as both a Superintendent of Survey and also a Deputy Political Officer. However as we will learn later there had been some problems in 1870 and again in 1872 about which no official action seems to have been taken.
In 1870 he had returned to England on leave and in September he had met his 1st cousin, George, eldest son of his naval uncle William. George was living with his father in the Notting Hill area while he waited for an appointment to his next ship. In his diaries George describes some of their activities together.
Despite a considerable age difference, James was 36 and George was only 20, they appear to have enjoyed each other’s company. Over a period of a fortnight they spent a lot of time together, including going on visits to the British Museum, Tower of London and Sadlers Wells. Also James was present at his aunt’s (George’s mother) birthday party and another family party where he was very amused to hear about his uncle’s earlier “flirtations and love affairs”.
George also mentions a number of other disconnected features about James. Apparently at times he was very preoccupied by his affair with “the fair and fickle Elise” (this lady will appear again later and in some ways is the heroine of our story); he was very generous, offering, to George’s embarrassment, any present of his choice. We also learn that he weighed 17 stone 4 lbs. At the end of September George joined his ship, Lord Warden, in Portsmouth, where he received from James the present of a very expensive pair of binoculars. James sailed from Southampton for India in the Pera on 8th October. George had hoped to see him off, but his Commander refused to give him leave and he had to say his farewells in a long telegram. In the summer of 1873 James returned to England to marry Elise. The marriage took place on the 1st October and James with his new wife returned to India.
Within nine months a terrible tragedy had occurred leaving their lives in ruins.