A hot night in Bengal

One hundred and seventy years ago, on the 1st of August 1840, a court-martial convened in the East India Company military base of Dinapore (now Dānāpur, in India’s Bihār state).

Dinapore was a staging post on the route up the Ganges plain inland from Calcutta towards Delhi, and an important garrison supporting East India Company rule in the sub-continent: it was the largest military cantonment in Bengal. Within it there would always have been based a large population of European soldiers doing their best to cope with an unfamiliar culture and an unfamiliar climate. (By the start of August, Dinapore would have been well into the monsoon season, with an average temperature of close to 30°C and weather dominated by massive convection thunderstorms.) Historically, the British response to culture shock and to hot weather has often revolved around downing large amounts of alcohol, and a manuscript in the Library’s collections (MS.2127) details the results of one such incident.

The manuscript, currently undergoing conservation work, consists of a large volume into which an unknown clerk has bound numerous letters and administrative documents generated at the base in the period 1840-1841: material relating to stores and supplies sitting alongside accounts of courts-martial and other important hearings. On August 1st 1840, a court-martial was assembled to hear accounts of an incident not long after dawn that morning – although for at least one of the participants this had clearly been not the start of the day, but the end of a long night.

An Assistant-Surgeon looking after the artillerymen at the base, a Mr Barber, takes up the story, relating that "this morning between the hours of 6 and 7 Oclock whilst I was examining the eyes of a Patient in the Artillery Hospital", Gunner Shehan – who was one of two sentries guarding a patient, Gunner Hasterley, for reasons not set out in this account – left his post and came over to Barber "in an insolent way" and demanded why he, Shehan, had not been allowed entrance to the hospital to visit his wife, who was a patient there at the time. One possible reason for his not being admitted occurs in Barber’s next sentence, in which he notes that "Perceiving that the Man was Drunk, I desired him to go away, and not interrupt me".

Whether Shehan is drunk from the night before, or has made an early start on drinking this morning, the diagnosis is convincing. Barber’s rebuff sends him away for a little while but soon he is back:

shortly afterwards [he] came back in a more violent manner and repeated his Questions, adding that I had no business to take a woman into Hospital that did not belong to the Detachment, that a Mrs Coveny a Patient there, was a Whore, and that I had admitted her, to make money by her, that I was a Buggar, and not fit to have charge of an European Hospital…

You can almost smell the alcoholic breath and feel the spray of spittle as the rant continues. Barber has had enough, but his next intervention does nothing to calm the scene:

I then desired the Apothecary to call for a file of the Guard to take him away. On hearing this Gunner Shehan walked up and down close to me, and after a short time asked if I intended to confine him; on my answering in the affirmative, he became furiously enraged, said he was on duty, and that I had no right even to speak to him, and that he would run his Bayonet through my bloody Guts; he immediately drew it out, and advanced towards me with the wilfull intention of carrying his threat into execution.

Barber calls out to Gunner Dunn, the other sentry guarding the mysterious Gunner Hasterly, and a struggle follows:

he sheathed his Bayonet, but again and again threatened to stab me, and put his hand on his Bayonet to draw it out again. Seeing him struggle with Gunner Dunn, I went into the Ward and procured a Stick for my own defence, being in momentarily expectation that he would succeed; Soon after a Guard of Sepoys [native Indian soldiers] came up, and he was with difficulty taken away, continuing however the whole time to abuse me.

We may be in up-country Bengal in the mid nineteenth century, but scenes like this play out in taxi queues and pedestrian precincts across Britain every weekend. Gunner Shehan is unusual, mind you, in being so drunk so early in the day. His defence is not included in this documentation so we do not know if he had the presence of mind to blame the monsoon weather for upsetting his European bodily rhythms. Nor do we know his fate, although drunkenness on duty and threatening an officer would normally be treated with considerable severity.

The conditions of India certainly seem to have had an impact on the volume itself: the pages are stained by damp at the top of the volume, which has led to mould-growth at some stage in the past. The entire volume is fragile, with easily fraying edges to the pages and traces of insects nibbling the paper. The images attached to this blog post give an idea of its current condition. At present the volume is undergoing work by our Conservation department and is not available for consultation, except by appointment with the conservators, whilst that takes place. In a painstaking process, the volume will be disbound, its individual pages cleaned and freed of the traces of mould and then placed in clear sleeves, and those pages then sorted into a more comprehensible order (the unknown clerk who compiled it seems simply to have stuffed a year’s worth of letters into the binder without regard to their order). When this is all done, readers will have the chance to explore more British interactions with the Indian Subcontinent. One hopes – vivid though this little window on the Raj is – that they will be more elevating scenes than the one just laid before us.

Images: top, a Hindu shrine in Bihar province, from the Wellcome Library's Iconographic collections (catalogue record here). The remainder of the images are of MS.2127, including one taken in the Library's Conservation studio as work begins upon it.

Schnaps: public messages about alcohol

This graph (left: Wellcome Library no. 689465i) is one of the latest works to enter the Wellcome Library catalogue. Unexciting to look at, perhaps, despite its outlandish subject. It combines two graphs in one: the top half shows new admissions of alcoholics at twenty-three Swiss cantonal lunatic asylums between 1908 and 1928, and the bottom half shows fluctuations in the price of fruit brandy in Switzerland over the same period. So during the First World War, the price of fruit brandy rose like the Matterhorn and the percentage of alcoholics among those entering cantonal lunatic asylums collapsed. Fruit brandy (non-grape brandy, Schnaps or Schnapps) is presumably mentioned owing to the use of much of the fruit grown in Switzerland for that purpose. As shown in the two examples below, the support of fruit-growers always seems to be prominent in earlier Swiss anti-alcohol campaigns, long before drunken driving became the theme of choice.

Right, Wellcome Library no. 689357i : colour lithograph after H.B. Wieland, urging a "Yes" vote in the referendum of 6 April 1930 on alcohol reform.

Left, Wellcome Library no. 689394i: colour lithograph after M. Goetz for the Swiss league of women abstainers, ca. 1905.

The graph (to return to that) looked strangely familiar. The reason was, that the British media in January 2010 were awash with discussion of a report on the same subject issued by the House of Commons Health Committee, bluntly entitled Alcohol. Appropriately, the report was released just before Christmas 2009.

The House of Commons Committee took evidence from four historians who have published on different aspects of the history of drinking and intoxication: Dr James Kneale (UCL), Dr Angela McShane (Royal College of Art/V&A Museum), Dr James Nicholls (Bath Spa University) and Dr Phil Withington (University of Cambridge). Their presence shows the strength of the tradition of cultural and social history in the UK. Their work informs chapter 2 of the report, which deals with the history of alcohol in the UK from 1550, and puts the recent increases in consumption into context by emphasizing "the huge decline in consumption from the late 19th century to the mid-twentieth, and its subsequent rise". One of the historians who gave evidence to the Committee also pointed out that there was a long history of British select committees examining the problems associated with alcohol.

A point much taken up by the media has been the association between consumption of alcohol and price: the Committee recommended both the introduction of a minimum price for alcohol and an increase in the rates of duty. The effect of low pricing was stressed by the President of the Royal College of Physicians (Professor Ian Gilmore, a high-profile opponent of excessive drinking). Several graphs in the report make similar points to those in the Swiss poster, though without trying to match price against side-effect in the same graph. This one shows the decline in the relative price of alcohol:

The effect on liver disease was mentioned over 60 times in the report and illustrated in this alarming graph:

In the 1929 Swiss poster, and others in the same series in the Wellcome Library, liver disease is not mentioned, and one might doubt whether a statistic for it would have been obtainable at that time. In the 2009 UK report, admissions to psychiatric services are not prominent. In the interval, clinical pathology services and statistics have increased while psychiatric hospitals have closed and the inpatient in general has become a relative rarity (unless the aged are accounted as such). Alcohol stays the same but the culture changes around it. Hence the relevance of historians who are not mere chroniclers of a single subject but are able to weave rich social and intellectual contexts around, and into the fabric of, a subject.

Also striking is the willingness of the Swiss publishers in 1929 to put a graph on a poster. Most designers today would be horrified, which may say more about designers than about the relative efficiency of graphs as against other forms of exposition.

Wellcome Library no. 659413i

Another poster from the same period (above) provides a better topical comparison, in that it conforms more with the taste of today's advertising industry. It shows a Swiss farmer bringing home a herd of 25,000 cattle, which meander through a vast Alpine valley. The value of the herd is the same as the annual cost of alcoholism to the Swiss Confederation. The composition (attributed to the Bernese artist Viktor Surbek) is certainly vivid, and the message could well be effective in a country where people have both a sense of responsibility to their local Commune and a feeling for how much a cow costs. But probably neither of those two criteria applies to the student binge-drinkers attending the "Carnage UK" events described in the House of Commons Committee report.

For further comment see the blog of the BBC's Home Editor Mark Easton, and the reactions to the report published there. For entertainment of a rather cruel kind, the grilling of the drinks industry's PR people by members of the committee is hard to beat: the MPs reprint it verbatim in their report.