WILLIAM HENRY SALTER (1880-1969) AND THE MŰRREN KURSAAL

I’m holding in my hand a piece of a vanished world, a playscript written by my great uncle Willy.

William Henry Salter (1880-1969), c1910

Uncle Willy and his brother Fred, my grandfather, were both keen mountaineers and before the First World War they made regular trips to climb in Europe. They formed climbing and skiing parties with experienced locals, and my father told me once that when the war erupted across Europe they had to cut their connections with many close friends in Germany.

In the manner of the times, and in the years before television, house parties made their own entertainments after the exertions of the day. They would read to each other, set each other puzzles and word games and devise comic sketches together. For Willy and Fred these were intellectual, cerebral entertainments of a sort learned from their father, who met with his friends regularly to read and discuss Aristotle (in the original ancient Greek).

Willy Salter (standing behind, centre) and Fred Salter (standing right), c1910

Willy’s play was written at one such gathering. The nine-page sketch is like an early Yes, Minister, set in the front office of a Cabinet Minister and with lots of satirical humour about civil service intransigence and ignorance about small (and therefore comic) corners of the British Empire. The punchline involves the salute to which the King of Tonga is entitled being increased by two guns.

It’s called In a Government Office and the cover of the typed script includes the note “First performed at the Kursaal, Mürren, on December 30^th 1911,” to which my father has added by hand “by Uncle Willy and friends.” A New Year house party in the Swiss Alps!

The Kursaal, Mürren, c1920 – the remote village, high in the Bernese Oberland, is still unreachable by road in 2014

Although it was probably performed as a reading rather than a full performance, the description of the stage set is very detailed –

Private Secretary’s room in a Government Office. Fireplace in centre at back. Window on left. Desks on either side of fireplace, both piled high with papers, books of reference etc. Desk-telephone on each desk. Door at back (right) leading into Minister’s room. Door at side (right) leading into passage.

It’s a three-hander: the characters are Blenkinsop (a messenger), Mr Tremayne (a permanent official) and Miss Carstairs (a member of the public). There’s no specific note of the cast: Uncle Willy and friends, one of them perhaps one of the women so unsuitably attired in the group photograph above.

In a Government Office, by Willy Salter and friends – the painting behind is Glacier de Tret la Tête, by Noel Rooke, painted in 1911 – the climbing figures were added in 1915 with a new dedication “To FG Salter” after Fred suffered an injury in the trenches which ended his climbing career

The date of the performance is highly significant. According to Wikipedia, “Mürren has its roots as a farming village. However, it has grown in size and wealth owing to tourism in both summer and winter. Tourism and winter sports have been an important part of Mürren's history since 1911, when the first British winter tourists arrived.” Those first British tourists, therefore, three years before the start of the First World War, included Uncle Willy and friends. Now the Kursaal, the cast and that whole pre-war world have gone; and only the rust-speckled script survives to remind us how things were. The civil service, I suspect, remains largely unchanged.

MARGARET FRANCES WHEELER (b. 1837) AND THE SOWAR OF THE SATICHAURA GHAT

In 1907, an elderly Muslim woman in northern India made a deathbed confession to a Roman Catholic priest. She was, she claimed, Ulrica, daughter of General Wheeler of Cawnpore. 

General Hugh Massy Wheeler (1789-1857)

I’ve written here before now of the Cawnpore Massacre. In 1857 all but four of the 900-strong European population of the Cawnpore garrison in northern India were killed in one of the early atrocities of the Indian Mutiny. My cousin Captain Robert Jenkins was among the dead, as was another cousin, General Hugh Massy Wheeler who commanded the garrison. 

General Wheeler’s wife Frances was also killed, and Eliza one of his daughters, and a son Godfrey who was serving in the Bengal Army alongside him. Another daughter, Margaret, was with the family as her father led the garrison to the Satichaura Ghat, the steps at the edge of the river Ganges from which they had been promised safe conduct. 

Massacre at the Satichaura Ghat, 27^th June 1857

As the mutineers began instead to slaughter those whose safety they had guaranteed, Margaret was grabbed by a sowar, one of the rebellious Indian soldiers. It was assumed that she too died in the ensuing slaughter (by local butchers using meat cleavers) of the women and children of the garrison. Her name still appears on the memorial to these victims.

Soon after the event the story began to circulate that she had defended herself fiercely with sabre and pistol, killing four of her captors before throwing herself down a well to preserve her honour from violation. It was a gruesome end, but a satisfyingly heroic one, which upheld the high moral principles of the British imperial elite.

Miss Wheeler Defending Herself Against The Sepoys At Cawnpore

(a contemporary engraving from The History of the Indian Mutiny by Charles Ball)

In fact, Margaret Wheeler, also known as Ulrica, survived. Whether the sowar rescued or simply captured for himself the twenty-year old Ulrica is not clear. She was seen, claimed Edward Leckey writing only the year after the massacre, riding side-saddle in the English fashion and wearing a veil. By 1865 it was known that she was not only still alive but had married the man who saved her life, Ali Khan.

This news was greeted not with joy but with a shocking display of imperial racism. Lady Wheeler, Ulrica’s mother who died at Cawnpore, was of mixed race; this was not uncommon in Indian colonial society. Having celebrated the manner of her honourable English death, Ulrica’s survival now was because she was “by no means of pure English blood,” according to historian G.O. Trevelyan writing in 1865. The implication was that a proper pure-bred Englishwoman would have behaved as Margaret was supposed to have – either dying to protect her honour or, having lost it, committed suicide.

George Otto Trevelyan (1838-1928), historian and politician, author of Cawnpore (Macmillan & Co, 1865)

Ulrica became a Muslim and with looks inherited from her mother she disappeared into Cawnpore’s Indian community. Was it an early case of Stockholm Syndrome? Or did she just want no further part of an imperial power which could be so two-faced about one person in death and in life? 

For more on Ulrica Wheeler, her treatment and colonial life in general, Clare Anderson's book Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World 1790-1920 is detailed, readable and insightful.

REV WILLIAM JAMESON (1749-1827) AND THE DIVIDED CONGREGATION

My 3x great grandfather William Brodie Gurney was a devout and active lay Baptist. All five of his daughters who survived to adulthood married into families like the Gurneys with a long history of non-conformity. Three of them married ministers (one of them married two!) and in 1832 one, Mary Ann, became the wife of William Kingsbury Jameson, the grandson of Rev William Jameson, a Baptist minister caught up in the internal spiritual politics of the rising nonconformist movement.

Mary Ann Jameson nee Gurney (1812-1871)

granddaughter in law to a minister with a sore head

The nonconformists are the big story of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the emerging radical alternative to the established Church of England. Coinciding with the industrial revolution, nonconformism was the engine for the biggest social change in British history, the creation of a middle class.

Within the nonconformists the big story was the rapid splintering into sects and subsects which followed the legalisation and acceptance of religious dissent. There were particular Baptists and general Baptists, Trinitarians and Unitarians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Calvinists and Socinians, all disagreeing violently about their own special form of dissent.

Rev William Jameson was a Calvinist Trinitarian: to oversimplify grotesquely, this meant a belief in the Holy Trinity of God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and the possibility of salvation from man’s natural state of sin through responding to God’s calling of those He chose. Jameson learned his theology at Homerton Academy soon after its opening; Homerton was a strictly Calvinist “dissenting academy” founded in 1768 by and for nonconformists, who were barred from an education at either of England’s two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

Homerton Academy moved to Cambridge in 1894 and became Homerton College, whose alumni include many important non-conformists and, more recently, the actors Julie Covington, Cherie Lunghi and Olivia Colman

Jameson served as the minister for a congregation in Warminster for ten years 1772-1781, before he was invited to audition for the congregation at the Old Meeting House in St John’s Lane, Wolverhampton. After eight trial sermons in March and April 1781 he was appointed there, with instructions to take up his post on 24^th April. He duly resigned from Warminster and arrived on the appointed day with his family and possessions. Having become aware of theological divisions in the congregation during his trial period he was not entirely surprised to find the chapel door locked against him and another minister engaged to conduct services.

Poor Jameson had unwittingly walked into a hornet’s nest of nonconformist conflict, a congregation bitterly split between the Calvinist, Trinitarian majority and a growing Socinian, Unitarian minority. The latter had not forgiven the former for ousting their leader, William Jameson’s predecessor of some twenty-one years’ service, the Rev John Cole. Although for the sake of peace Cole had gone quietly and had even recommended Jameson as his successor, his supporters were not so forgiving. The Unitarians simply occupied the building.

The Old Meeting House, St John’s Lane, Wolverhampton (built in 1701, now demolished) - locked door also pictured

Jameson and the Trinitarians had no choice but to go elsewhere. They set up a makeshift chapel in a converted barn off Dudley Street; but when the homeless worshippers built a new church in Temple Street, then known as Grey Pea Walk, Jameson moved on. He accepted a post at John Street Meeting House, in Royston, Hertfordhsire, putting the Wolverhampton feud behind him.

Jameson’s obituary describes him as “eminently distinguished by humility and spiritual-mindedness.” But it must have hurt him in 1790, after nine years in Royston, to be accused by some in his now-divided congregation there of Socinianism, the very form of Unitarianism which his opponents in St John’s Lane professed. He retired “with a painful head condition” and lived out his days in the company and care of his daughter.

John Calvin (1509-1564) and Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604)

who lent their names to opposing theologies

Meanwhile in Wolverhampton things became violent over the next few years in the Old Meeting House. On several occasions riotous Trinitarian crowds forced entry to the chapel, disrupted worship there with hoots during services, and eventually brought lengthy legal proceedings (from 1817 to 1839) to recover their financial share in the chapel from which they had been driven. The case was widely reported as The Great Fight At Wolverhampton. It is not a dignified history, and one is tempted to ask the Trinitarians, if not the Unitarians, to ponder what in similar circumstances Jesus might have done.