Content warnings: racism, spousal abuse, child marriage

Rosemary Sutcliff notes that her aunt Edith married

…Archie, weak-willed and amiable, who did not tell her beforehand that he was a quarter Indian — his mother being the product of an Indian Army colonel and a rajah’s daughter — what would have happened if he had told Aunt Edith before it was too late, there’s no knowing. Maybe she would still have married him, but I very much doubt it. As it was, finding out afterwards, she refused to have children — I very much doubt if she even allowed him into her bed! — and set out to make his life a cold hell to his dying day. I have been there at some family gathering myself, puzzled as a dog may be by stresses in the air, the electric discharge of things I did not understand, when he came into the room…

For many years, the family were quite seriously prepared for Uncle Archie to murder her one day, and prepared, if he did, to go into the witness-box on his behalf and swear that he did it under unendurable provocation.

This is an uncomfortable passage about the racism of her aunt, and the readiness of the rest of the family to turn a blind eye to both the aunt’s racism and the potential for her to be murdered by her husband. Sutcliff attempts to play both for laughs, but I doubt if it went down well in the 1980s when the book was published and it certainly doesn’t work for today’s reader.

‘Race’ is a social construct anyway, but NB that if Uncle Archie’s grandmother was a rajah’s daughter, but had a European mother (as is implied), Archie himself would have been an eighth of Indian heritage rather than a quarter.

I decided to check up on the details of the story, and found some interesting data. “Aunt Edith” is Edith Fanny Sutcliff (1871-1960), who in 1897 married “Uncle Archie”, Archibald Gordon Selwood Langley (1872-1943), son of Charles Archibald Langley (1841-1877) and Sarah Elizabeth Hewett (born 1850, married Charles on her 20th birthday, lived to at least 1901). Sarah is reported as being the daughter of Colonel William Selwood Hewett (1824-1889) and Frances Elizabeth Hall (1835-1865). All were born in India. Sarah’s birthdate is recorded as 5 December 1850, and her parents’ wedding as 30 October 1849. Frances’ birthdate is recorded as 14 September 1835, so she was married six weeks after her 14th birthday and gave birth to Sarah a couple of months after her fifteenth birthday. Errm…

Frances herself was the daughter of James Frederick Hall (1809–1837) and Ann Clifford (1816–1865). She was the third of her parents’ four children, born between 1832 and 1837, and her mother then had another seven children with her second husband. James and Ann married in 1831, when Ann was still 14, so errm once more. Again, this is all happening in (British) India. But this doesn’t fit Sutcliff’s story, which is that Archie’s maternal grandmother (Frances) was a rajah’s daughter; unless the suggestion is that Ann had an extramarital relationship with a rajah in her late teens, a couple of years after her marriage to James.

But maybe the story got confused down the generations. James Fredrick Hall’s parents were born in England, but I note that the records of Ann Clifford’s parents are sparse; her father John Clifford is known to have died in 1830, a year before her early marriage, and the only information we have about Ann’s mother, Archie’s great-grandmother, is her first name, Elizabeth. It could have been Elizabeth who was begotten by an Indian father in the closing years of the eighteenth century. This would have made Uncle Archie technically only a sixteenth Indian rather than a quarter or an eighth, but prejudice is rarely interested in the facts. (Or indeed Elizabeth herself might have been the daughter of two Indian parents, and then become known by an English name.)

And Aunt Edith still sounds horrifying, no matter what her husband’s ancestry was.