The murder of Bamber Gascoigne

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This book, about real people, was intended to be about quite different ones. In her postscript, Helena Drysdale, the travel writer, says that her initial purpose had been to write a biography of her great-great-grandfather Sir George Bowen, who was a serial governor of colonies — Queensland, New Zealand, Victoria, Mauritius, Hong Kong.

Through all these governorships he kept elaborate scrapbooks, and by far the largest concerned New Zealand. In this one Drysdale’s eye was caught by a cutting about the Maori murder of Bamber Gascoigne, his wife and their children, in 1869. ‘This unusual name happened to be that of my cousin, the celebrated writer and quizmaster.’

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She then found that three relatives of the murdered Gascoignes had written unpublished memoirs, sent from New Zealand to Bamber Gascoigne after their owners had seen him on television in the 1970s, and Bamber passed them on to her. ‘Disloyally’, Drysdale abandoned Sir George and went in search of the Gascoignes, which led her to Isabella Campbell who married a relative of Bamber’s, Charles Gascoigne of the East India Company’s Fifth Bengal Light Cavalry, in India in 1835.

One of the three memoirs was by Isabella Gascoigne herself, describing 20  years of married life in India, which Drysdale uses to evoke, without inventing, that almost unimaginable life of  barrack boredom, elegant balls, servants, silver-laced uniforms, plumed helmets, and jolting journeys in palanquins borne on the shoulders of bearers. Both Charles and Isabella were ‘on the fringes of aristocracy’, but as younger children of younger children almost penniless. India, in those days, was one of the few ways out, a place to earn a living without losing caste. Charles, at last, is caught up in a real and horrific battle, against the Sikh army in the Punjab, in which he greatly distinguished himself.