Violet Mona and Reginald Peel: An Indian Life and Afterwards
We know Violet Peel as the second wife of Reginald Peel; their story exemplifies
the English families who lived, worked, and died under the British Raj (colonial
rule).
Violet’s expression on the blog* is resolute:, ready to cope with the climate, the
wildlife and the daily fear of malignant disease. Raj officers’ wives are now
parodied as ‘memsahibs’, flaunting their ‘white privilege’ but that, even if true,
was no defence against the privations of a posting to India, Malaya or some other
outpost of the empire.
Violet and her twin sister Flossy (Florence) May were born in October 1897 to
George Grant, an Army accountant, in the cantonment (barracks) in Coloba, one
of the seven islands in the Bombay Presidency.** Her other siblings were born
wherever her father was stationed – George, Gibralter (1893); Arthur,
Ahmednager in Maharashtra (1895); twins Henry and Albert, Ajmer in Rajasthan
(1903). Ajmer Junction was also an important railway hub, where Reginald Peel
worked and where his eldest son died.
Reginald’s life typified how India could both give and take away. He married
Frances Maude Vlieland in June 1906; his first son Francis was born in March
1907, and died in Ajmer that November at nine months old. Frances died of
malignant malaria, a condition of pregnancy, in Wellington Mansions, Fort
Bombay, in February 1914, aged just 29. There was no birth in 1912 or 1913, so
there may have been an unrecorded stillbirth or miscarriage.
Reginald’s was an ‘old’ Indian family. He was born in 1873 in Moradabad in
Bengal and (like his father Nathaniel) was a comptroller (auditor/accountant) on
the BB&CI.*** Headquartered in Churchgate in Bombay (now Mumbai), his work
could take him 500 miles away to Ajmer and Sirwi (now Sirui), where Barbara,
his third child, was born in November 1911. Reginald’s second son, Clifford, born
in December 1908 and never in India, was named after Reginald’s own younger
brother, who lived for only a month after his birth in Bengal in 1874.
Reginald would have shared social and professional circles with George Grant
and his family in Ajmer and Bombay. In June 1916, he came home to announce
his engagement to his parents-in-law, Charles and Alice Vlieland. Whether it
was a conciliatory or a bitter interview, while the marriage took place in Naini
Tal, Bengal, in September, Clifford and Barbara did not go with him.****
Reginald had five sons in his ‘second family’: Keith (b. 1917, who we have just
met on the blog), Clarence (b. 1919), John (b. 1923), Laurence (b. 1927) and
Michael (b. 1929). The eldest three sons were born in Bengal, so Reginald must
have been posted to the ABR or the EBR network; ***** the gap in births between
Clarence and John and John and Laurence may again mean infant deaths
Now the picture becomes less clear, and if any descendant families can help to
complete it, please contact the blog.
Violet and Reginald left India some time after John’s birth in 1923, settling in a
rural village in West Sussex, where Laurence and Michael were born. In 1937,
Violet took a lease on 19A Eaton Place, a beautiful John Nash-built terrace
running down to the sea in the ‘old India hand’ quarter of Brighton around
Eastern Road. Reginald died there aged 64 in January 1938, and Keith was
probably married from the flat later in the year.
Violet died in 1992 aged 94. She married Horace George Wood in 1945; he died
in 1957, so Violet was widowed again after 12 years of marriage. Her brothers
Henry died in 1964 and George in 1970, her sons Keith in 1941, John in 1985
and Clarence in 1986. John deserted from the Army and was imprisoned for
stealing when on the run in 1948, aged only 25, possibly triggered by Keith’s
death. We are still investigating the Surrey Assizes’ records, so may know more
later.
*14 August 2013.
**Violet and Flossy were born into a city suffering the worst outbreak of plague
in Mumbai’s history. We shall make a separate post on how the outbreak
changed the city and the lives of everyone who lived there.
***BB&CI = Bombay, Baroda and Central Indian Railway.
****One explanation is that Reginald did not want to burden the 19-year-old
Violet with a 4- and 7-year old stepchild and was happy to leave them with their
grandparents. The other is that Charles and Alice were totally opposed to
abandoning their grandchildren, and especially Clifford, to Violet’s care in India,
and Reginald acceded.
***** ABR = Assam Bengal Railway; EBR = Eastern Bengal Railway.
Death in Bombay, 1897
We have seen that Violet and Flossy Grant were born in the army cantonments
in Coloba, one of the seven islands of the Bombay Presidency, at the height of one
of the worst outbreaks of bubonic plague known in the city.
The British Raj (colonial) government wanted Bombay to be the first city of
India, second only to London, with its Gothic architecture and historic
monuments such as the Victoria Railway Terminus and St Thomas Cathedral in
the centre of the city.
But this was a façade, a showcase city built on a tiny cluster of low-lying islands
facing the sea. There was a small elite overclass and an impoverished working
population in the mills and the docks living in chawls (tenenents) built on badly
drained unpaved ground, often with stagnant water standing in the streets. The
plague infection, spread by flea-carrying rats in grain and other goods traded
from Hong Kong, arrived in Mandvi and Coloba in September 1896 and quickly
took hold throughout the city, with a death rate estimated at 61% by 1898.
George Grant, Reginald Peel’s father-in-law, would have been at the forefront
of the Army response, quarantining. disinfecting and segregating the lower-class
population, removing them to temporary hospitals and ‘plague camps’ and
razing the chawls to the ground in an attempt to cut off the rats’ breeding
grounds. This was in most cases an overkill response to an environmental
‘enemy’ that could not be beaten without an upgraded drainage and sewage
infrastructure, and since similar draconian measures were not applied in the
European districts, there was strong social discontent.
The government response was also hampered by religious tensions: the Jain
merchants and Muslim traders around the Mandvi port were opposed on
religious grounds to the killing of any animal, including rats, and eradication was
almost impossible in these districts.
George Grant’s wife Mary was pregnant from February to October 1897, while
also caring for the 4-year-old George, Jr and 2-year-old Arthur; although they and
Violet survived there is still a question mark over Flossy, who does not appear in
the photographs of the Grant family on the blog of 24 August 2013.
Acknowledgements are due to Cynthia Desmukh, Proceedings of the Indian
History Congress, 49, 1988, and Nadia Nooreyezdan, Atlas Obscura, 14 May 2020,
for some of the material in this post.
