Botany, Empire and Deep Time 2: from Bath to Vellore, tangled dates, loot and two rebellions
Walking and asking questions in Bath’s Sydney Gardens with Richard White
Dr Richard S. White, Artist-researcher, Senior Lecturer in Media Practice, Bath Spa University www.walknowtracks.co.uk
Bath’s Sydney Gardens opened at the end of the Eighteenth Century as an exclusive enclosed park for a wealthy, predominantly white, elite. It was to be the core attraction at the heart of the Pulteney Estate, a speculative venture aimed at prospective residents and visitors to the City. Many of these people were living on the income generated for them by captured and enslaved Africans in the plantations of the West Indies or enjoying riches looted by the East India Company from the kingdoms of India. Time has passed and that history, uncomfortable for some, still haunts the city, hiding in plain sight. Today Sydney Gardens is free to enter and aims to be an inclusive and welcoming urban park for all.
Invited to make a new series of walking investigations in and through the park, I have continued to explore traces of that obscured past, picking through a reluctant heritage embodied and embedded in plants and buildings, coded into their names. Perhaps, by finding out more about how botany, empire and deep time connect, we may more readily embrace the social and climate justice essential for our survival. I have worked with this research, weaving it into two new circular walks heading out to the edge and beyond the park. The dramatic equestrian Ride around the park is long gone, but Sydney Gardens is still bounded by walls and a busy road. The sound of hooves on turf is rare, but the roar of the road is pervasive; the noise and smells of the combustion engine urgently reminding us of the impact of industrialisation. There are no longer any horses, we won’t be climbing the walls, but do take care crossing the roads!
An over and under walk from Bath to Vellore and back, involving questions of names, random dates and two rebellions
Lets us begin at the Temple of Minerva with a case of aspiration and mistaken identity
This recently restored structure has had a chequered career: think of it as a stonemason’s exemplar but not quite on the scale of the palace on the hill that Ralph Allen commissioned to showcase his Bath stone quarries. This is a Bath stone replica of a Roman Temple made for a show in London. Look closely and touch the stones: this is rock brought down from under the hills that embrace this city. From where you stand, you can see the downs rising up under those trees; fields and houses are a honeycomb of quarries. Holes, cavities, spaces for bats and parties, echoing caverns, darkness and silence, some heroically filled in and closed forever to save genteel Victorian terraces on Combe Down from subsidence. What memories and presences haunt those spaces? This stone from under the hills formed around the remains of living creatures at the bottom of warm shallow seas over 180 million years ago; look closely and you can see their skeletal remains, the oolites. As you feel this beautiful stone and prepare to walk, consider the hidden honeycomb of absences and the silences left behind. Here in the landscape city of Bath, the landscape itself is a metaphor.
Look closer at the pillars and, as well as the remains of those millions-year-old creatures, you can see more recent wounds. Is this erosion, or are they the marks of the chains that moved and assembled and reassembled these stones? This structure has certainly been around and treated rough! No one wanted it in London, and it ended up back here, now rather uncomfortably close to the champion Catalpa tree. It was built in Bath, dismantled and reassembled in London at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham for the Empire Fair of 1911, and there it stayed until the City had to pay for its return. It was reconstructed here in 1913, alongside the bandstand; a somewhat incongruous iteration of the landscape garden picturesque, but the bats like it.
That sequence of dates works, but if you go inside you will see a bronze plaque referencing the work of Frank Lascelles dated 1909! The name Lascelles notoriously associates with the wealth of slave-ownership, and the plaque clearly intends us to remember a particular family member. That year Frank Lascelles had just resigned as British Ambassador to Germany. He came from a family that had, over several generations, amassed a fortune from the trade in, and labour of, captured and enslaved Africans. These efforts were rewarded in peerages and finally, in 1835, Grandfather Henry Lascelles, Second Earl of Harewood, was awarded over £26,300 (approx £3.4m today according to the Bank of England). This was in compensation for the ‘release’ of the 1277 people he held enslaved on his plantations in Barbados and in Jamaica. What Frank was doing in Bath, and why he resigned, is not significant here, although in the end it may point towards the death struggle of the old European empires, from which their wealth was extracted. A struggle sadly commemorated in the Peace Oak in these gardens just nearby.
This, however, is a case of mistaken identity! The Frank Lascelles memorialised in this plaque, and this repurposed, roughed-up, replica Roman Temple at Sydney Gardens, was simply someone who wanted to glory in the Lascelles associations. In the warm glow of Edwardian England, Frank Stevens was an actor/impressario who, as Lascelles, became the go-to man for large-scale celebratory Empire ‘pageants’. In 1909, between staging the settler spectacle of 300 years of British presence in Canada and an event celebrating the opening of the white Parliament in South Africa, he had popped into Bath for a bit of pageantry in Victoria Park. According to the Blue Plaque on a house near Banbury, he became known as ‘the man who staged the Empire’. This self-proclaimed Lascelles produced the pageant for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, but not the earlier 1911 Empire Fair where this replica temple was shown. We can only conclude that the plaque was looking for a home after his triumph in 1909, and then when the unwanted temple was brought back from London in chains, it was bolted to the back wall! Such are the uncanny, uncomfortable and serendipitous connections of Sydney Gardens, botany, empire and deep time.
Unlike his chosen namesake, Frank Lascelles, the pageant master died in poverty in Brighton. It is unclear whether we are intended to remember him in connection with the recently named Lascelles Avenue, on the new Holburne Park estate nearby, or the family of slaveowners he associated himself with. Frank Cavendish Lascelles, the diplomat, died in wealth, his body lies beneath a broken tombstone in Brompton Cemetery, West London. Finally, we should acknowledge that the ground around us was once a Roman graveyard, so perhaps in the end this old temple has found its rightful place in the city.
Lets move on, you can find out more about the story of the Catalpa tree which stands in front of the temple in my previous walks. Maybe just put your head against the tree and see if you can hear the sound of the Quqin, the ancient Chinese instrument made from its wood.
Cross the main promenade, and walk across the grass towards a rather grand bridge over the railway to your left. From the grass, and as you mount the steps, imagine where you might be going…..straight ahead there are bushes and a wall, behind which you may just see a big Victorian house. There is a small door in the wall. It could be the beginning of a children’s story, or perhaps, imagining a return, its the end of a secret adventure. Evidently this is not intended for us. This bridge promises so much: once, perhaps, we were really going somewhere but it now appears walled off and again we are excluded. This area was once the site of some of the Garden’s most famous attractions: the maze, the Merlin Swing and the grotto. I am indebted to Kirsten Elliott’s work here (2019), she suggests that this area was not grubbed up by the navvies as the Great Western Railway came through, but was more a victim of the carve up of the Ride into building plots, a kind of further privatisation of the space. There are relics, however, and we are on our way towards one….
Before we leave the bridge, have a look at the space in front of you and try to imagine the original gentle ripple of the hill down the park. Digging that great cutting was a huge engineering project conducted largely by an army of labourers. There were deaths here, and there have been others more recently. Below us, in the space and along the rails, are resonances of slave-ownership. Attuned to those legacies and following the money we find it invested in the Great Western Railway, so here I want to acknowledge the exploitation and othering of fellow humans it represents. Let’s take a moment on the bridge to consider and reflect.
Spectres in a Tunnel, to the Caribbean and beyond
Walking quietly, cross the bridge holding those thoughts, and head for that small white gateway ahead just to the left across the grass. It will take us onto the Kennet and Avon canal towpath; turn right and we are heading towards a tunnel, the River Avon, Bristol and beyond. In your imagination, try to take that journey west in time and space, from Bath to the Caribbean, the threads are here to follow if you choose to take them up. The white cast iron bridge ahead evokes the Chinese designs fashionable at the time. Check out my previous walk in the park for more on how these bridges connect into the Atlantic slave trade and the early metalworking firms of Bath. Today, we walk under the bridge and towards the tunnel, remembering that the canal also relied on the wealth of slave-ownership.
The first chairman of the Kennet and Avon canal, Charles Dundas, came from a dynasty interconnected with and enriched by the wealth of empire and slave-ownership. A number of Dundas claims can be found in the Legacies of British Slavery research, Charles’ brother was briefly the Governor of Guadeloupe, and he was a relative of Henry Dundas, the infamous politician. Henry was the first president of the Board of Control, an attempt to reign in the excesses of the British East India Company. Charles Dundas is memorialised in the name of the canal aqueduct a few miles east of here; Henry Dundas is memorialised by a statue in Edinburgh, his attempts to disrupt Wilberforce’s abolition bill make the statue a contemporary focus for censure rather than the intended acclaim.
From under the cast iron bridge, look ahead and up to a great house that straddles the canal: this was once the headquarters of the Kennet and Avon canal company. Much has been written about this house, not least in its recent restoration to sumptuous grandeur and sale. Tugging on the threads of names and material remains pulls us West and into the darkness of the atrocities of empire. More prosaically, notice the grooves in the stone to the right at the entrance to the tunnel, feel the memory of hard labour inscribed by bargees’ tow ropes. This was once an industrial thoroughfare, camouflaged and romanticised as it went through the pleasure garden. Cleveland House rises up above us, and in a moment we are underneath it, somewhere there is supposed to be a bricked up hatch where bargees paid their dues. Can you find it, or is that just a patch in the tunnel roof?
This part of the canal was opened in 1804, with the full route opening in 1810; in that same year, William Harry Vane inherited a significant part of the Pulteney Estate. Without going into the very complicated family details, his set of names and titles unlocks many of the street and building names in this part of Bath: Cleveland, Darlington, Vane and Forester to name but a few. A slave-owner, William Harry Vane, 1st Duke of Cleveland, was the Viscount Barnard until 1792, known as the Earl of Darlington 1792–1827 and as the Marquess of Cleveland 1827–1833, before becoming the Duke of Cleveland in 1833. His slave-owning grandfather was a Governor of Barbados, and at the time of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Vane still owned 233 of his fellow humans, inherited as chattels, on the island of Barbados. Two years after Bath’s great celebration of Emancipation in Sydney Gardens, on 25 April 1836, Vane claimed and was awarded £4854 (worth £567,000 today) as ‘compensation’ for their release. Not of course that it was a release or that any of the funds went to the formerly enslaved people. When Vane died in 1842 he was worth in excess of £3m (worth £347million today). Descendants of enslaved people were bequeathed lives blighted by racism and the inherited trauma of kidnap, forced migration, enslavement and rape. A question of reparatory justice haunts this space and many connected spaces in the City of Bath. Vane had first married into the wealthy Powlett family, and it is through this connection we get to Captain Francis Forester, his son-in-law, who finally inherited the Bathwick estate in the late Nineteenth Century
Walking out of the tunnel, following the path or up the steps on the right, we might reflect not only on the vast wealth that was flowing into Bath as the canal filled but on the sources of that wealth, its legacies, social justice and our responsibility. As we stand above the canal in front of Cleveland House, perhaps not resisting taking a little snoop into the windows of the house, take a look down the canal towards Sydney Wharf. Imagine it bustling with narrow boats carrying coal, stone and timber. Walk round the house to the left, and look over the low wall, if you can, to see a sign that says Sham Castle Lane leading to Vellore Lane, another set of names to conjure with. Sham Castle is, as it sounds, not a real castle; like the temple in the park, it is another picturesque exemplar of Bath stone, something to look at. No Lord Sham memorialised up there, however! But was there a Lord Vellore?
Sultans and loot, walking with the culture war
Walk to the pavement of the busy road surrounding the park, on the other side, almost straight ahead, are the great Victorian villas built on the Ride in the early 1850’s. The wall at the end of their gardens blocked our path and the sightlines from the railway bridge earlier in our walk. There were plans, never realised, to sell off the Ride entirely for a series of villas around the park, but on this side, on the land overlooking Sydney Gardens, a series of mansions were built. One of them was named Vellore, and it appears to memorialise a place, a town in South East India, in the state of Tamil Nadu. So no Lord Vellore here, but a fascinating story emerges gruesome, poignant and romantic.
Turn right on Sydney Road, cross the beginning of Sham Castle Lane, follow the pavement and take a right into the entrance of the Bath Spa Hotel. A path to the left takes you off the drive and up into a landscaped garden. Vellore Lane would once have taken you to the front of the house, but now we are walking up through its former private garden. Some of the trophy planting and architectural features survive resonating with Sydney Gardens below. In the gaze from the terrace of this now much-extended building there are so many presences and absences. The question lingers, why would someone choose to name a great house in Bath after a town in southern India?
Lets begin with General Augustus Andrews, who named the house, bought the land and paid for its building in 1835. He retired here and became a key supporter of the Bath Horticultural Society, an organisation closely aligned with Sydney Gardens. Andrews had been an officer in the British East India Company; like many privileged young white men of his generation, he had been recruited as an officer into the company’s private army. Their role was to train, manage and lead a locally recruited army of ‘sepoys’. As an officer in the 27th Madras Infantry, he took part in the storming and destruction of Srirangapatna in 1799. This battle is seen as the last stand of the indigenous rulers of the states of India in the face of the British colonial advance. Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, was killed in the battle; the city, his palace and his armoury were looted by the British. Much of this has been dispersed into private collections; some significant fragments are on public display at Powis Castle (NT) and the Victoria and Albert museum in London, (e.g. ‘Tipu’s Tiger’ automaton). Dalrymple (2020) offers a value of these spoils of empire at £200 million.
Arthur Wellesley was a senior commanding officer at the fall of Srirangapatna; at the dinner where he received the news of Tipu’s death, he proposed a toast ‘to the corpse of India’. Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, Prime Minister and national hero, oversaw the distribution of the Srirangapatna loot through a Prize Committee, ensuring that officers and sepoys received a share. How much Augustus Andrews took, or whether he also drank to this news, we don’t know, but he was honoured with the medal auctioned with his other awards at Dix Noonan Webb in 2004 for just over £4000. Tipu Sultan’s children and retinue were captured and taken east; they were imprisoned in the ancient fort at Vellore, the place Andrews chose to memorialise in this property in Bath.
Uprising at Vellore
Roshani Begum, the mother of Tipu’s eldest son, together with over 700 women, including dancers and Tipu’s other wives, were in the retinue taken from the ransacked palace to Vellore. Along with the dancers came the musicians and the instruments they had saved from the looting. These dancers and musicians became the focus of an uprising at Vellore that foreshadowed the major uprising that would take place against British rule fifty years later. The British had been reducing the maintenance payments to Tipu’s family and court, making it difficult for the dancers and musicians to maintain their ancient courtly culture. In a further cultural wounding, new dress codes were being enforced on the sepoy militia, in order to Europeanise their appearance. As well as a ban on the turban and other uniform changes, Muslim soldiers were forced to cut their facial hair, and Hindus were forbidden from wearing religious marks on their faces. These instructions had been communicated to the Madras Infantry by Adjutant-General Patrick Agnew, who was since disgraced, reinstated and finally, on his death, memorialised at St Swithuns, Walcot, Bath. The measures were enforced by corporal punishment and the lash, and those who reluctantly complied feared rejection from their people: this was a culture war with appalling consequences.
Resistance focused at Vellore around the dancers and musicians. One night, in July 1806, following the wedding celebrations of one of Tipu’s daughters, the sepoys of the Madras Infantry at Vellore mutinied, killed their officers and those who defended them, and hoisted Tipu’s flag of the Kingdom of Mysore from the fort. Roshani’s son, Fateh Haidar, heir to Tipu Sultan, was proclaimed king. The uprising was swiftly suppressed with extreme violence by the British; estimates vary on the number killed, with the rebel sepoys taking the worst. Captured mutineers were summarily shot and, following a brief trial, others were brutally executed. Was Augustus Andrews there? Did he name his house in memory of all this? Perhaps not, but for a moment, as we overlook the gardens of Vellore House in Bath, let us consider how, despite the horror of Sriringapatna, music and dance torn from Tipu’s court was performed again as acts of resistance at those weddings in the ancient fort at Vellore.
After the rebellion, Tipu’s sons and daughters were forcibly exiled again. As for Roshani, the dancers and the musicians, it appears that some continued to be held at Vellore (Howes 2020). There were repercussions for the East India Company, including a brief period of disgrace for Patrick Agnew, but British rule continued to be consolidated. The fort was a British prison until Independence; in 1832, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the British deposed last King of Sri Lanka, died there after seventeen years in enforced exile. In the twentieth century, as the Indian Independence movement gained strength, activists and freedom fighters were incarcerated there.
Such are the many resonances of Vellore…
The White Mutiny, Andrews disgraced
We have not done with Augustus Andrews yet; shortly after the Vellore uprising he was involved in his own rebellion: the White Mutiny of 1909. In this case, it was the white European, mainly British, officer class who rebelled against their employers, the East India Company. These officers had been recruited on the basis that they would receive a handsome share of the profits of British occupation, in the form of various allowances and floot via the adjudications of the Prize Committee. Looting was legitimate in the East India Company, and officers expected their share. Essentially, this was a dispute over pay, financial perks and privileges which saw some officers go freelance in a series of mutinies, taking their sepoy battalions with them. Officers broke into the treasuries at a number of locations, looting villages on the way to Srirangapatna, where again it all ended in blood and tragedy. Hundreds of sepoys died, shot by their countrymen, simply because they were following the orders of their mutinous officers. Officers were captured and court martialled. Described as being one of the ringleaders of one of the mutinies (Dix Noonan Webb 2004), Augustus Andrews was dismissed and sent back to London. Just three years later, he was re-instated by the East India Company, and was returned to India with the rank of Major. He rose through the ranks, continuing to share the profits of the advancement of British colonial rule in India. Economist, Utsa Patniak (2019), estimates that between 1765 and 1938 Britain drained approximately £9.3 trillion from India.
Augustus returned from India in 1824 on sick leave, perhaps it was this that brought him to Bath and the building of Vellore House. Let us walk with him across the grass to his final trophy, and perhaps a relic of the heyday of Sydney Gardens as a pleasure ground for the wealthy. Looking down the lawn, there is a low construction covered in ivy; you can walk around it and almost enter it; the eroded stones offer an otherworldly, sound deadening acoustic. This is a grotto, a fashionable construction in eighteenth century landscape gardens; some landowners even employed a hermit to contribute to the picturesque nature in a further level of antiquarian romance, but this is no ordinary grotto. According to Kristen Elliott (2019), this is The Sydney Garden Merlin’s Grotto, a last remnant of the attractions cleared away when the two houses on the Ride were built. Erected shortly before Andrews’ death and the sale of the new houses in 1853, the dates tie up. As Kristen notes, because of his associations with Sydney Gardens, Andrews would have been well placed to know about the building works, and was rich enough to be able to salvage, transport and reconstruct the grotto. So lets go with the idea that this is a relic of Sydney Gardens and imagine ourselves back to the bridge over the railway line in the park. This strange and secret place is what would have been waiting for us at the heart of the maze.
Returning from the labyrinth
Having followed this walking story thread through a few entanglements of botany, empire and deep time, our arrival at this pile of tufa limestone is certainly not quite as it would have been on an excited day out at Sydney Gardens at the turn of the nineteenth century. We are visitors of the twenty first century, the promise from the bridge may have been unfulfilled, but here we might reflect on the labyrinth of our journey as we view another transported and reconstructed object. Listen for the unheard stories in the stones, can you hear the sound and movements of Tipu’s court, the voices of the people Vane owned; can you hear children in the maze, echoes of the afternoon brass band on the bandstand? My grandfather played a cornet in the Salvation Army, and in the First World War he was conscripted to India as a bugler. Perhaps he stood guard at Vellore. Can you see an inflatable boat crossing the Channel, but for an accident of birth it could be you or me….
Moving on, and getting you back to the Gardens, follow the path to the hotel drive and cross down into Sydney Gardens, the white cast iron bridge we walked under is on your left. Cross the bridge and bear right and you will find yourself walking down the main promenade, past the temple. Look up at the Catalpa tree, touch the wounds of the temple as you go by. Is anything different?
All images by Dr Richard White.
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