A ‘sahib’ on a return visit

It was moving and memorable without being mournful or in any way maudlin. I mean the dinner in memory of Philip Crosland, one of the last British editors on the Statesman, who died on July 14, a week short of his 94th birthday.

Philip’s daughter, Susan, and her husband, Colin Shaw, were the hosts last Saturday at her home down a country lane that wound its way between tall hedges in the depths of Hampshire, more than an hour’s drive from our abode in London.
The Shaws couldn’t have done it better. Such occasions can so easily turn into heavy exhibitions of ostentatious grief. Not last Saturday’s gathering of more than 30 of Philip’s friends and relatives. The rising chatter of conversation, the clink of glass and clatter of knife and fork might have suggested an ordinary buffet dinner. But even without the small pile of offprints of Philip’s obituary from the London Times and an illustrated 15-page ribbon-bound souvenir on a hall table, there was no mistaking the underlying solemnity of the occasion. Susan’s few well-chosen words at the end and the exchange of reminiscences it sparked set just the right note.
Guests tended to fall into two groups. There were those with an India connection, demonstrating again — as Philip’s own life did — that even if you take an Englishman (or woman) out of India, you seldom succeed in taking India out of him (or her). And there were colleagues from the Surrey Advertiser, the local paper on which he worked till his 80th birthday, led by the editor, Graham Collier, who had come up from his Devon home. Graham told the company of the difficulty he had in convincing the Advertiser’s management that even at his advanced age and with his failing eyesight, Philip was an editorial asset. It was typical of Philip that when he did finally retire and the encomiums flowed thick and fast at a farewell meal, he stood up to ask if he was in truth all that good why were they shoving him out. He was never one to mince words.
One of his Advertiser colleagues, Jane Russell, visited us in Calcutta maybe 25 years ago with an introduction from Philip. She was an intrepid young lady then, staying in a hitchhiker’s hostel, and limped barefoot into our flat one evening with her damaged shoe dangling from one hand. Time has borne out Jane’s courageous quest for adventure: she and husband Julian now teach English in China’s war-torn Xinjiang province. Another former colleague, Jane Garrett, author of the delightful illustrated A Portrait of the Surrey Hills, has married an ethnic Indian, Jay Kumar, whose family, being Christian, fled Lahore in 1947. Jay, my wife and I were the three Indians by blood in that company; many of the others were Indian in spirit without any of the superficial and superfluous affectations that are fashionable with some modern Western Indophiles.
Brits like them, linked by an umbilical chord of sentiment with the India of what is nowadays called the Raj, are a dying breed. Saturday’s guests were not young, but they weren’t old enough to have worked in pre-Independence India. But they had other links. Lyn Brookes and her sister Joy were the daughters of William (Bill) Catto, nephew of Lord Catto, governor of the Bank of England, and a director of Andrew Yule, once the biggest of the British managing agencies, which also ran the Statesman. Lyn, a qualified doctor, and her husband, Alan, who works for the Daily Mail’s book publishing arm, had just returned from a visit to Calcutta and Darjeeling. Fiona Harvey, also with her sister, both spouses being present too, is the daughter of another old India hand. He was into air-conditioning, and in his bachelor days shared a chummery with Evan Charlton, the Statesman’s last British editor. Fiona is a professional art photographer with pictures on display in Delhi’s Pragati Maidan.
Another woman came up as we talked to ask about Garden Reach, the Calcutta suburb. What I gathered in the hubbub of conversation was that she wasn’t sure whether it’s a place or a building but has a drawing of the river, a boat and a large house with a handwritten inscription saying “Where we lived” or words to that effect.
In keeping with his early attempt to defend China against the invading Japanese, support for Indian soldiers in the East Indies against overbearing Dutch officers, and his help for Gurkha veterans, Philip’s favourite charity, Susan announced, was Help for Heroes. It’s a major effort to rehabilitate military personnel, especially the wounded from Afghanistan.
Philip Crosland joined the Statesman in 1938. He enlisted with a commission as soon as World War II broke out, and suffered cruelly as a Japanese prisoner of war after his regiment surrendered in Borneo in 1942. After editing the paper’s Delhi edition for several years, he retired in 1967 as general manager at the Statesman’s head office in Calcutta. We continued to meet whenever I was in England, and he took me to see Muffin, who he claimed was a Calcutta dhobi’s donkey. Muffin was waiting quietly on the Surrey downs for Philip and the carrot he took. Muffin was one of several lifelines to the life he had loved. As Philip wrote in Sahibs Who Loved India, an anthology Khushwant Singh edited, “like all Englishmen (and Scotsmen, Irishmen and Welshmen) who have lived in India and come to regard it with affection, I think of myself as temporarily absent, on extended leave, as it were, merely filling in time before that long return visit I have promised myself.”
Perhaps he’s there now on that long promised return visit.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author