“On Easter Monday Simla was the scene of the first fashionable wedding of the season, that of Captain McElhinney of the Royal Engineers, to Miss Nora Jackson, sister of Mr. W. S. Meyer, Deputy Secretary in the Finance Department.
The ceremony took place at Christ Church. The bride, who looked charming, was gowned in the regulation white duchesse satin, with one of the new circular trains, the front of the skirt and bodice being beautifully worked with silver and pearl embroidery, with a flounce of lace on the edge of the panel. Her ornaments were a pearl necklace with pearl and diamond pendant and a bracelet en suite, and a massive half hoop diamond ring, the gifts of the bridegroom. The bridesmaids, Miss Horne, Miss Flood Murray and Miss Jackson – who were escorted by their attendant groomsmen, Mr. Haslam, R.E., Mr. Clark, R.E. and Mr. Anderson, R.E. – were very bewitching in white brocaded silk frocks with large picture hats turned up on one side with pink roses. They wore true lovers’ knots of pearls and turquoises, the gifts of the bridegroom. The bride was escorted up the aisle by Mr. Meyer while Mr. Risley (Acting Finance Secretary) escorted Mrs. Meyer. Mr. G. Lubbock, of the Royal Engineers, acted as bestman. When the signing in the vestry was over, the bridal party walked down the aisle to the strains of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and in the porch they passed under an arch of steel formed by the swords of the officers’ present at the Church. The subsequent reception held at Grasmere was a crowded and most gay scene.”
My great-grandmother Nora Evelyn Weaver Jackson, the bride, was born on November 23, 1875, in Bellary, Madras, India. Her mother’s name was Mary Fanny. Her father was William Weaver Jackson who had been a Conductor with the Madras Sappers and Miners and subsequently risen to the rank of Major.
The Royal Engineers, known colloquially as the Sappers, is a corps of the British army that, to this day, provides engineering and technical support to the British Army. William the Conqueror brought military engineers with him when he invaded England in 1066. The current Sappers trace their origins all the way back to them. They have served the Crown for an unbroken span of nearly a thousand years. Their motto is Ubique & Quo Fas Et Gloria Ducunt ("Everywhere" & "Where Right and Glory Lead). They have been a part of every major and minor conflict that Britain has ever had. In 1856 the Royal Engineers and Royal Sappers and Miners combined to become the Corps of Royal Engineers.
Sappers originally referred to the people who dug trenches during warfare. The Miners would then dig tunnels from the trenches to under the walls of whatever fortification they were trying to breach and dynamite it from below to help the cannons do their work. The Royal Sappers and Miners, of course, were responsible for much more with each advance in technology, but the name stuck.
A Universal Military Dictionary defines Conductors as, “subordinate officers who are assistants to the Commissary of Stores and whose work it is to conduct depots, or magazines, from one place to another; they also have charge of ammunition wagons in the field.” By Royal Warrant in 1879, it was decreed that their position should be inferior to that of all commissioned Officers and superior to that of all non-commissioned Officers. In 1892 the title Conductor of Supplies was changed to Staff Sergeant Major 1st Class.
In 1600, the British East India Company was founded to organize trade in the Indian Ocean. Initially, it controlled what is now India and Southeast Asia but eventually, it spread further into eastern Asia establishing outposts in places like Hong Kong. The Company traded in cotton, silk, spices, sugar, tea, and opium. At one point it was the largest corporation on the planet and had a private army twice the size of England’s. In 1858, the Government of India Act transferred control of the subcontinent to Britain which created the occupying government known as the British Raj. The formerly private company armies were then absorbed into the standing British forces. In 1874, the year before Nora was born, the British East India Company was formally dissolved, and the Crown took over control of everything.
I don’t know very much about my great-grandmother’s life. For a while, after William retired from the Military, the family moved back to England and lived in Bedfordshire. An 1891 census lists Nora as a scholar, so she was going to school. She was fond of poetry and plays. A couple of months before they were married, Mac, as my great-grandfather was nicknamed, gave Nora a beautiful leather-bound set of Shakespeare plays. In a small writing journal of hers that I have, many of her friends wrote in snatches of poetry.
My great-grandfather was thirty-seven when they got married, and Nora was twenty-four. They got married on April 3, 1899, and my grandfather was born eight and a half months later, on December 16, 1900. Close enough. I would venture to say that their wedding night was a traditional one in every sense. Nora’s father William had sadly passed away two years before. That is why her brother-in-law, William Meyer, was the one who escorted her down the aisle. He was her older sister, Mabel’s, husband.
Just seven months later, Nora died of blackwater fever.
Blackwater fever is a rare complication of malaria that struck Europeans living in India who had no natural immunity built up against it. It’s a horrible way to die. I’ll spare you the details.
It must have been devastating. My great-grandfather enlisted the help of a friend or a cousin and did his best to raise my grandfather, Geoffrey, on his own. He was totally at a loss. They created a series of charts and checklists to help get them through. Finally, when Geoffrey was six, Mac took a leave and sailed with Geoffrey back to England and placed him in boarding school.
My grandfather attended Rugby School, whose famous alumni include Lewis Carroll, the war poet Rupert Brooke, and Salman Rushdie. Like Lewis Carroll, he then went on to Corpus Christie College at Oxford where he studied, among other things, Hindi Law. At twenty-four, he returned to India as a Civil Servant.
Mac would live to see Geoffrey and Doris get married in Bombay in 1933. My Uncle Michael was born in 1933 but I am not sure whether they ever laid eyes on each other. Mac returned to England where he died in 1934, a year before my mother was born.
William Meyer who escorted the bride down the aisle rose to become the first High Commissioner for India. In 1915 he was Knighted by King Edward VII so Nora’s sister, Mabel, became Lady Meyer. Losing her sister at such a young age was not the only tragedy she would face in her life. One of their sons, while still a small boy, was playing on a window seat and fell off. The cord from the drapes wrapped around his neck and he was strangled to death. William, himself, two years into his post as High Commissioner had a heart attack while out walking in Westminster and passed away at age 62
The British were often in places they never should have been. Colonial families faced climates and landscapes that were radically different from that of England. They were susceptible to diseases for which they had no generational immunity built up to fight. The motto they all lived by was “Don’t give in to it, and it will give in to you.” That might have kept them going, but it certainly wasn’t true.
Mr. Risley, who had accompanied Mabel at Mac and Nora’s wedding while her husband was giving the bride away, was chosen to give the speech at the reception:
“Our charming hostess has commanded me to ask you to drink the health of the bride and bridegroom. When Mrs. Meyer smiles a command at you – she is, I am sure, incapable of commanding any other way – to hear is to obey. Unfortunately, obedience – a virtue I profess always and practice occasionally – does not of itself inspire one with any original ideas on a subject which is always old and always new – the subject of weddings.
Certain obvious remarks will of course have occurred to you. You will have noticed perhaps that the sun shone upon the bride: in point of fact it is shining now. That is by general consent an excellent omen, and I am assured by the Meteorological Reporter that you can make a dead certainty of it by getting married at Simla in the month of April.
You will also have observed – one must be very blind not to see it – that beside the gift of exceeding prettiness the bride has the further gift of blushing most bewitchingly at appropriate moments – such as the present. And many, if not most of us here, know by experience – I certainly do from the memory of old times in Darjeeling – that the bridegroom is one of the best of good fellows. All of this, of course, goes without saying, and might have been much better said.
But there is something more. There is a point about this wedding to which I wish to draw your special attention. It is an illustration, a living and breathing, and may I add a loving illustration, of the ancient proverb, “it is an ill wind that blows nobody good.” Last year, as most of us remember, an ill wind rose in India and blew the plague to Calcutta and caused the profoundest searchings of heart to the Government of India. To go to Calcutta or not to go that was the question: and it was settled in an ingenious and characteristic fashion. The Government of India considered what departments they could most easily spare, what departments would be least regretted and these – prosaic and superfluous appendages such as the Financial, Home, and Revenue Departments – they sent to Calcutta to take their chance.
But the precious and ornamental departments, which no one could spare, the Army Department and the military members of the P.W.D. (Public Works Departement), of which the bridegroom is one of the chief pillars – these they stowed safely in Simla. And the most precious and ornamental department of all, the ladies, - they followed the flag as they always do; they stayed in Simla to look after the army.
Now Simla as all of us know is a sort of 19th century Arcadia: Arcadian in its innocence; Arcadian in its simplicity, witness the artless costumes of our shepardesses here to-day; Arcadian also, especially in the winter, in its aptitude for going about in pairs.
In this winter Arcadia that ill wind which blew no good to anyone else in India wafted our pair of lovers into each other’s arms and has now safely landed them in the quiet love-locked harbour of matrimony, where never wind blows loudly – or hardly ever – and where I ask you to drink to their life-long happiness.”
Nora is buried in Naini Tal, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
😢