Bloody revenge on the Raj - in the heart of Westminster
Revenge may famously be a dish that’s best served cold, but few can have left it to moulder for quite so long as Udham Singh. On April 13, 1919, British soldiers opened fire on several hundred demonstrators in a walled garden in Amritsar.
For ten minutes they pumped more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition into the crowd, leaving around 350 people dead — no one knows the precise number.
In March 1940, 21 years after apparently witnessing the Amritsar massacre, Udham Singh walked into Caxton Hall in Westminster. First, he calmly popped a boiled sweet into his mouth, then pulled out a revolver from his overcoat pocket and shot dead the man he believed had been responsible, Michael O’Dwyer, the former lieutenant governor of the Punjab.
Immediately arrested, Singh was put on trial at the Old Bailey — he grinned happily throughout — and sentenced to death by hanging. But he was determined to escape the noose by starving himself to death first. A macabre farce ensued with the prison authorities force-feeding Singh to ensure that he was in a fit state to make it to the gallows.
By the time he was executed, he had become a hero in India, hailed as the man who courageously — if rather belatedly — exacted retribution on his colonial oppressors.
In Britain, of course, it was a different story. Far from being a hero, Singh was reviled as the very worst sort of ‘native’ insurgent. But as Anita Anand makes clear in this briskly plotted, scrupulously evenhanded and altogether riveting book, the truth was a lot more complicated.
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a start, there’s no evidence that Singh was even in the garden in Amritsar on the day in question. Although he claimed to have got out in the nick of time, he may well have been several miles away.
What’s more, the man he shot, Michael O’Dwyer, didn’t give the order to open fire.
That was his number two, Brigadier general reginald ‘rex’ Dyer, a combustible clot who, when asked why he had let his men carry on firing for so
long, said nonchalantly, ‘I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would realise that they were not to be wicked.’
O’Dwyer, by contrast, was a Persian poetry- loving man from Tipperary, happily married and — on the surface at least — free from any brutish excesses. He was, however, implacably opposed to Indian nationalism and had developed a fierce hatred of gandhi. O’Dwyer had acquired an equally fierce hatred of Indian food, too, insisting on bringing his own lunch with him in a basket whenever he was invited anywhere.
not everyone in england was impressed by Dyer’s and O’Dwyer’s behaviour — Winston Churchill called it a ‘monstrous act’. At the time, though, Churchill was in a tiny minority.
On his return to London after the massacre, O’Dwyer was greeted by cheering crowds, fawned over by politicians on all sides and invited to the smartest dinner parties.
He later earned a very good living on the lecture circuit, where he offered his audiences dire warnings about the state of the raj. The man who would eventually kill him, Udham Singh, had a thoroughly wretched start in life.
Brought up in an orphanage, starved of love, money and opportunity, he came to regard the British as sadistic tyrants who were keeping millions of Indians — above all himself — in conditions of degrading servitude.
Singh grew up when the brutalities of the Indian Mutiny were still fresh in everyone’s minds. Within four months of the 1857 mutiny, the British had executed more than 100,000 Indian sepoys in an attempt to stamp out rebellion in their ranks.
Some were tied to the mouths of cannons and blasted to pieces in front of their fellow
The British in India quelled a rebellion at Amritsar by massacring 350 people. One survivor waited 20 years and travelled thousands of miles to kill the man he held responsible
soldiers to teach them a lesson — just in case they too harboured any mutinous thoughts. Thousands more were strung up on makeshift gallows.
While they were dangling from the gibbet, still alive, they were used for bayonet practice in order ‘to improve morale among British troops’.
Singh, a loner, a drifter and a philanderer — he abandoned his wife and children without any apparent qualms — spent a while in the British Army where he made vague attempts to stir up sedition before being kicked out for insolence.
Eventually he went to the U.S. where he worked on the assembly line at Ford Motors in Detroit.
The one quality he had in abundance was patience. Determined to kill both
O’Dwyer and Dyer, he bided his time — and kept biding it year after year after year. indeed, he left it so long that by the time he was finally ready to strike, Dyer had already died.
While the sensitive, cultured O’Dwyer didn’t feel the slightest stab of remorse, the doltish Dyer had been increasingly haunted by regret and guilt. As he told his daughter-in-law, all he wanted to do was die ‘and know from my Maker whether i did right or wrong’. he had his wish soon afterwards, suffering a cerebral haemorrhage in July 1927. So many people came to his funeral at St Martin- in- the- Fields that they couldn’t all fit in the church.
Another 11 years went by, during which Singh moved to London and worked as a ‘sports outfitter’. And still he watched and waited. When at last the day came, Singh wrote a single word in his diary — ‘Action’ — then set off for Caxton hall with a spring in his step and a sense that he was finally fulfilling his destiny.
After killing O’Dwyer, as well as wounding people who were standing beside him, Singh was tackled by a ‘substantial woman’ with the splendid name of Bertha herring, who threw him to the ground as he ran past.
‘Only one dead, eh!’ Singh said ruefully after his arrest. ‘i thought i could get some more. i must have been too slow.’
When David Cameron visited the Punjab in 2013, he laid a wreath at the foot of the Martyrs’ Memorial in Amritsar. Pinned to the wreath was a note which read, ‘This was a deeply shameful event in British history.’ no one could argue with that, but it’s taken until now to learn just what a bizarre, barely credible aftermath it had.