The London Daily Newsletter Tuesday 20 June

On 20 June 1756, 146 British subjects were held overnight in Calcutta, India by Siraj-ud-Dowla, the Nawab of Bengal,. Supposedly only 23 survived the night. There is a lot of controversy on this issue. It is now widely accepted that the British exaggerated the event. As the story goes, on the capture of Calcutta by Dowla, the English garrison consisting of 146 men under the command of John Zephaniah Holwell, were locked up for the night in the common dungeon of the fortress. The dungeon was a strongly barred room and was not intended for the confinement of more than two or three men at a time. There were only two windows, and a projecting veranda outside and thick iron bars within impeded the ventilation, while fires raging in different parts of the fort suggested an atmosphere of further oppressiveness. The prisoners were packed so tightly that the door was difficult to close. One of the soldiers stationed in the veranda was offered 1000 rupees to have them removed to a larger room. He went away, but returned saying it was impossible. The bribe was then doubled, and he made a second attempt with a like result; the nawab was asleep, and no one dared wake him. By nine o’clock several had died. and many more were delirious. A frantic cry for water now became general, and one of the guards, more compassionate than his fellows, caused some to be brought to the bars, where Mr. Holwell and two or three others received it in their hats, and passed it on to the men behind. In their impatience to secure it nearly all was spilt, and the little they drank seemed only to increase their thirst. Self-control was soon lost; those in remote parts of the room struggled to reach the window, and a fearful tumult ensued, in which the weakest were trampled or pressed to death. They raved, fought, prayed, blasphemed, and many then fell exhausted on the floor, where suffocation put an end to their torments. The British prisoners resorted to cannibalism to quench their hunger and thirst in the ensuing pandemonium. About 11 o’clock the prisoners began to drop off fast. At length, at six in the morning, Siraj-ud-Dowla awoke, and ordered the door to be opened. Of the 146 only 23, including Mr. Holwell (from whose narrative, published in the Annual Register for 1758, this account is partly derived), remained alive, and they were either stupefied or raving.

Elephant Field
The grazing elephants of Hampstead Garden Suburb…

One of the last occupiers of nearby Park Farm was the circus proprietor Lord George Sanger, who retired there in 1904, and was notoriously murdered by a farm hand in 1911. His descendants continued the circus in operation until the 1960s. When the circus was not touring, Sanger would put his elephants out of pasture in what would become, in a few years, Hampstead Garden Suburb. An elderly former resident of Denman Drive – constructed in 1908 on what was once Westminster Abbey’s land – used to recall ‘elephants grazing’ in the field between Big Wood and Little Wood, before Denman Drive North and Denman Drive South – constructed in 1912 on what was once the Bishop’s land – were completed.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

Paddington Station at Night (1992) Since Doreen Fletcher (born 1952) was a teenager, she has been committed to drawing and painting what might be termed, ‘the almost gone’ – her immediate external environment and the traces left by people on the surface of things, in city and landscape, urban and rural

Doreen Fletcher

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster