Review Elizabeth is missing The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

Review

Elizabeth is Missing

Emma Healey Many will have seen the excellent 2019 BBC drama Elizabeth is Missing, starring Glenda Jackson as an elderly dementia sufferer searching for her friend, but perhaps not all will have known that this was a dramatisation of a book of the same name. I first became aware of this when I saw the book in the Library, and was interested to read it to see how close the story was to the drama.

It often happens in adaptations for film or television that significant parts of a book are cut in order to streamline a production, and this was the case here. The book features more detail and additional side plots, making a very satisfying read.

The story centres around Maud, an elderly lady with dementia, and her daughter and granddaughter who try to care for her. Maud’s condition means that she has very little short term memory, but still has clear memories of when she was a girl growing up.

Maud is very worried because her friend Elizabeth is not at home. She visits over and over again, still finding her not there, but can’t seem to convince anyone that Elizabeth is missing. As the story develops we gradually find out what happened to her, and another mystery from the past is also uncovered and eventually solved.

The story is narrated by Maud herself, giving a unique insight into what it must be like to suffer from this condition, and what might prompt some of the well-recorded strange behaviours of dementia sufferers. The character of her daughter is also well-drawn, and the glimpses we have of her frustration at Maud’s actions and her wish to find ways to care for her while still holding onto a full-time job ring very true.

The book is absorbing on two levels. The mysteries are gripping and Maud’s attempts to solve them (with no memory of the actions she has taken before) are heartbreaking. At the same time, as the book progresses, Maud’s condition advances and deteriorates until at the end she no longer recognises her own family and, now unable to read, sees reminder notes which she had previously written for herself as mysterious pieces of paper with marks on.

This book is well worth reading, even for those

Emma Healey who already know the ending, as the extra detail gives additional perspective to the story. It well-deserved the Costa First Novel Award which it won. The combination of the gradually unfolding mysteries and Maud’s limited perception of events as they happen is gripping, drawing the reader into the situation and, at least in my case, prompting a wish to get in there and help her! An excellent book, highly recommended. Christine Orchard

The Anarchy

The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

William Dalrymple Professionally, Britain’s great historian William Dalrymple has won many awards and honours; personally, he possesses great literary gifts and vast experience. This book, published in 2019 for the general reader, was a Sunday Times Bestseller. I found the recommendations listed on the jacket by Dalrymple’s respected fellow writers to be statements of truth, including: “An outstandingly gifted historian” (Max Hastings); “Dalrymple researches like an historian, thinks like an anthropologist and writes like a novelist” (Maya Jasanoff). A few minutes spent adopting a bird’s-eye view of the book’s layout – enjoyable and enchanting in itself – will repay great dividends: clarity and the readers’ needs are central for the author.

There are nine chapters and the Introduction makes clear what is to come: “This book does not aim to provide a history of the East India Company, still less an economic analysis of its business operations. Instead it is an attempt to answer the question of how a single business operation, based in one London

office complex managed to replace the mighty Mughal Empire as masters of the vast subcontinent between the years 1756 and 1803.” (p. xxxi).

The geography is India, the landmass lying between the Arabian Sea to the east and the Bay of Bengal to the west, and it is considered in two sectors: the provinces in the North; and those in the South. The book’s many images and illustrations – photographs, pictures, drawings, all reproduced in wonderful colour and detail and with important insightful captions – bring vividly to life the individuals, events, and places described. At the start, a ten-page index sets out seven descriptive groupings of local and external principal actors – the British, the French, the Mughals, the Nawabs, the Rohillas, the Sultans of Mysore, and the Marathas.

The East India Company, a private company with Directors in London, grew rapidly to command an army numerically greater and vastly better resourced than that of the London government. With that army, it controlled more than half of world trade and a territorial land mass greater than that held by the London government itself.

Dalrymple considers the extent and fabulousness of the wealth “looted” and shipped to London throughout the various decades of the story. Like the items themselves, the sums involved are almost beyond description and comprehension. Yet excavation of all the circumstances over the period is the task the author set himself: the policies of war and exploitation; the brutal suppression and deliberate destruction of indigenous peoples; the break up and extinction of their culture and long standing traditional way of life through coercion, co-option or infiltration; and driving it all the single-minded pursuit of profit and economic gain by a private company.

He also addresses and evaluates the role of the London government throughout the period and considers the consequences that ensued and endure to this day. His account of the impeachments held by

William Dalrymple the London Parliament and the several investigations by Select Committees of the House of Commons into the Company’s activities make gripping reading. In counterpoise are his magnificent descriptions of the Company’s far off bloody military campaigns that brought devastation to indigenous powers, leaders and peoples. These were a series of vast battles – wars planned and executed following the policy decisions of a handful of Company directors in London – effectively a State within a State.

Dalrymple has visited and researched across numerous archives, institutions and cities; he quotes from many manuscripts of the period; his language is rich, vivid and fluent. He displays great command of all these multi-stranded resources and materials, all neatly corralled and referenced for the more inquisitive reader. The writing sparkles on every page, much as the unimaginable quantities of looted gold, silver, and precious jewels of all kinds sparkled as they were carted off, along with huge amounts of other wealth, and loaded into ships for transport to London.

Dalrymple’s best-selling book is a work of measured enlightenment that explains how the world our forebears created for us in Britain came into being. If you have any interest in such matters this book is for you. Dalrymple demonstrates that, on a vast scale, those who created and charted the course that was pursued by the East India Company have left an appalling legacy. The history recorded is real and beyond dispute. We are today a wealthy first world country and how we arrived here deserves to be understood. Dalrymple demonstrates beyond doubt or dispute how a private company was able to act “consolidating a land empire that controlled over half a million square miles of territory and which, fifty years later, would become the British Raj.” (p. 381)

History should be honestly taught and its truths understood. Promotion of fairy tales, populist flagwaving, and jingoistic falsehoods about our history are neither helpful or acceptable. The book’s ‘Epilogue’ considers the power still wielded by some private companies, all household names, controlled by a handful of individuals unchecked by national governments, which today roam unfettered across national borders. The private banks at the heart of the recent ‘banking crisis’, and the print and electronic media communication companies are but two examples he considers: private companies today acting in plain sight in pursuit of their own narrow interests and left unchallenged by national governments. Like Spring on the horizon this book promotes discussion and brings hope of change and a new awakening. Hugh Pollock

Authors and their Books The case that had occupied and, for much of that time foxed, not just Mrs Jenkins but also her Fiona Chesterton predecessors in her office was that of a Canadian man who died in 1994. William Underwood left behind not “Secrets Never To Be Told” only a substantial estate but a mystery: he had neither The true story of a windfall inheritance and a family, friends, nor any birth certificate it seemed. very personal investigation His mother Jessie, who had died a quarter of a century Introduction earlier, was even more of a conundrum. Mrs Jenkins told The book tells what happened me it had taken several sets of genealogical detectives to when the author received an crack where she had come from. They discovered that inheritance from a mysterious Jessie had arrived alone on a boat from England nearly Canadian man. It led her to a hundred years ago. Within three years of her arrival, investigate the remarkable William had been born. His father and Jessie’s were both story behind it – of a young unknown. They were both illegitimate and, until this woman, born illegitimately summer, completely unknown to anyone in my family. to a farmer’s daughter in It was only in May this year that Mrs Jenkins Cambridge and raised for a had finally been able to present a petition to the life of domestic service, who Supreme Court of British Columbia and won a decree emigrated alone to Canada in 1912. She finds parallels to distribute William’s estate at last to ten beneficiaries. with her own life as she was born out of wedlock too. One of them, to my initial consternation and not a little scepticism, was me. Extract from the Prologue Here now, in the box, in a family tree so painstakingly What happens this quiet weekday December morning put together over seventeen years, is the proof of my seems to mark the ending of a remarkable story. Instead, amazing windfall inheritance. it turns out to be the start of another. Call it a personal quest, a journey of discovery or even a transformative experience, it begins here in my kitchen, in my house, in a small Cambridgeshire village. Our post lady Rose finds me, as I usually am these days, at home. She comes to the window and beckons me to go to the back door. She has a large package, a cardboard box around the size of a small suitcase, for me. As she proffers a delivery form for me to sign, she smiles, wishes me well with my early Christmas present and hands it over. It is surprisingly light and so is easy to carry inside and place squarely on my old pine table, bleached, scratched and stained as it is by thirty years of family use. I see the postmark of Vancouver and I can guess who sent it. Sure enough, I find inside a letter from a woman with whom I have been in correspondence for six months now. Mrs Jenkins, Estate Administrator from the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee of British Columbia, sent me a Biography Fiona Chesterton is a former BBC and Channel 4 journalist and producer. She has lived in Cambridgeshire for nearly thirty years, moving to Cambridge in 2015. In recent years, she has contributed essays and articles to several books on media subjects but Secrets Never To Be Told is her first full-length book. She was recently interviewed about the book – and particularly the issues she explores around the stigma of illegitimacy – for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. In June 2022 she will be talking about her book to members of the Cambridgeshire Family History Society. bank warrant for 36,000 Canadian dollars a few weeks ago Fiona Chesterton and now has written for the last time.

Here are memorabilia as promised. Thank you for taking them. Most of the photographs are very old … I am also enclosing a copy of the family tree … We have now closed Are you or a friend an author with a published book? our file and thank you for your cooperation and assistance. Tell the readers of Melbourn Magazine about how

This, then, was her last act in a case that had been and why you came to write your book, provide an opened the best part of two decades before. It was the end abridged extract, and some biographical details. of Mrs Jenkins’s work and, as I did not realise yet, the start Contact Melbourn Magazine for full details email: of mine. melbournmagazine@gmail.com Telephone: 261144.