Names and address of the person to send donations Cheques to:

 M R Cantem

49 Civil Lines,

Nr Saint Jude Shrine

Jhansi,

Uttar Pradesh  284001

INDIA

Letter:

June 2, 2006

 My name is Peter Foster, I am the South Asia correspondent of The Daily Telegraph based in New Delhi and I wanted to alert you to the existence of several old regimental graves recently discovered in the cantonment cemetery at Jhansi, north India.

 During my time as correspondent here, I have written several articles (copies attached) on the increasingly dilapidated state of British-era graveyards in India, many of which are on the verge disappearing completely.

 Until a year ago the Jhansi Cemetery was among those that had been ‘lost’ to the jungle, with several hundred headstones, including those belonging to former members of your Regiment, known only unto cobras and mongooses.

 According to records now being prepared at the cemetery, headstones belonging to your Regiment have been found at Jhansi with the date 1935.

 The restoration of the cemetery has been coordinated almost entirely by an indomitable, 80-something Anglo-Indian named Peggy Cantem who freely admits her vested interest in this project – she intends to take up residence in Jhansi Cemetery when her time comes.

 Which brings me to the second reason for my writing - I’m on the ‘scrounge’.

 Mrs Cantem, through a combination of arthritis and old age, will not be able manage the maintenance of the cemetery for much longer. Funds on a relatively modest scale are required if the jungle is to be prevented from taking hold again. For starters, a full-time gardener and caretaker need to be employed and boundary walls need to be repaired.

 I hope that your Regimental Association might be able to help – a few hundred pounds goes a very long way when converted to Indian rupees. Also, perhaps relatives of those who died in India during that period might wish to contribute. I don’t have family names at the moment, but could obtain them if there was interest. Perhaps you could place an appeal in - or publish this letter in - your Regimental Magazine?  Or point me in the direction of potential benefactors? All ideas and contributions gratefully received.

 I can be contacted at the address above in India, or c/o The Daily Telegraph, Foreign Desk, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DT. More immediate is email. Mine is peter.foster@telegraph.co.uk.  I can also be contacted on telephone numbers below.

 I do hope that the Seaforth Highlanders will be able to help in some way and I look forward to hearing from you,

 Yours sincerely,

Peter Foster

Mobile: +91 98 10 12 70 84 (GMT 5+hrs)

India still hunting a tiger economy

(Filed: 10/03/2004)

Peter Foster travels to Meerut to clear up some history from the Raj and look for signs of India's 'shining' future

It was one night after reading a chapter of Kipling's Jungle Book that my mother revealed a startling nugget of family history. "You once had a great-uncle who was eaten by a tiger in India," she said.

More than 25 years after I last checked under the bed for man-eaters, I find myself squeezing into the back seat of a tiny, Indian-made car in New Delhi, heading for Meerut, a small military town 50 miles north east of the capital.

We are on the trail of both the unfortunate uncle and, more importantly, the stories behind the emergence of India as an economic, cultural and military force in the modern world.

The car we are driving, a Maruti Zen, is a symbol of a new economic prosperity enjoyed by India's middle classes.

Out in the streets of Delhi there are thousands of these cars, honking and jostling for position against thousands of rival Tata Indicas, another Indian-made runabout.

After decades of unopposed primacy in the Indian car market, the familiar lumbering shape of the Ambassador, a sort of stretch version of the Morris Minor, now seems hopelessly dated.

It is a left-over from an era that India's ambitious leaders would like the world to believe is disappearing in the rear-view mirror of a modern, dynamic "Shining India" - to borrow the slogan of a recent state-funded advertising campaign.

Meerut is a prosperous town and the main street has showrooms full of gleaming Honda scooters and Indian-made 4x4s. Refrigerators, televisions and air conditioners are piled high outside the shops.

Meerut, which is well-known for the manufacture of cricket bats, is also a centre for medical professionals who offer treatment at less than half the price of doctors in Delhi. A dental surgery is advertising root canal work for 250 rupees (£3) in Meerut, three times cheaper than in Delhi. There is no shortage of takers.

This town was also the scene, on May 10 1857, for what English history teachers used to call the Indian Mutiny, but what Indian children know as the First War of Indian Independence, when elements of the Bengal Army revolted against British rule.

No one in Meerut seems overly burdened by the history of the place, so it takes several attempts to get directions to St John's Church, built by the British in 1819.

According to records, the great-uncle's cavalry regiment was stationed in Meerut at the time of his death. There is also a distant family memory of a plaque being erected in St John's in his memory.

St John's is in the cantonment area far from the hustle and haggling of Meerut's market. The crumbling building, a neo-classical structure painted in gaudy yellow, stands isolated in a very large, overgrown churchyard.

The door is locked, but Mr Kumar, the caretaker, finds a key. Inside, the last reminders of Britain's conquest of India are rotting away. On the altar of the church, where 40 or 50 Indian Christians still worship every Sunday, is an 1804 edition of the King James Bible.

A large pipe organ that accompanied a 1,000-strong congregation of young British soldiers singing hymns, has long since run out of puff. Mr Kumar heaves on the broken bellows. The machine lets out a dismal wail.

On the wall is a plaque: in Loving Memory of Lieutenant Lancelot Antony Gilliat who died at Jhansi while "following up" two wounded tigers on May 22 1935.

The brief commendation only tells part of the story. Gilliat, who was only 25 at the time of his death, far from saving villagers from a man-eater as I had always believed had, in fact, been shooting the animals for sport, as was the fashion for young army officers of the day.

His obituary in the regimental magazine, The Eagle, says one wounded tiger "mounting guard on its mate sprang upon Gilliat. He fired one shot which broke the animal's jaw, but this failed to stop him and his arm was badly bitten."

Returning to the frenzy of present-day India, the memories of the Raj assume an instant irrelevance.

There is something far more compelling going on all around as India struggles to achieve the grand vision of its president, A P J Abdul Kalam, who on the eve of the Millennium said he could envisage India as a developed country by 2020.

As we return to Delhi, however, there is evidence along the roadside of the grinding poverty which is the lot of the majority of ordinary Indians. For these people the experience of living in India in 2004 is very far from "shining". For all the Maruti Zens, McDonald's and fancy cocktail bars now available to the richest 10 per cent in Delhi, India remains a nation crippled by extremes of poverty and disease.

The same India that attracts call centre jobs from Norwich to Bangalore and hosts glitzy International Fashion Weeks in Mumbai is a place where 65 per cent of the population still don't have a bank account, rural suicide rates are at record levels and just 0.2 per cent of the population wear designer clothes. Even the educated "middle classes" are finding life tough.

Last year, when India Railways announced it was creating 30,000 "petty" jobs at 6,000 rupees (£75) a month, more than 700,000 people, many graduates, applied. People died in the resulting riots, such was the desperation to find work. As China grows ever stronger, the next few years will be crucial for India's ambitions to take the seat it craves at the top-table of nations.

Next month India will hold a general election. Now that the ghosts of the Raj have been laid to rest it is time to focus on the future.

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Historic colonial graves left to rot in India

By Peter Foster in New Delhi

(Filed: 06/11/2004)

Hundreds of graveyards containing the remains of soldiers, officials and adventurers who served in British India are on the verge of being lost for ever.

Lack of money, petty vandalism, organised theft and the encroachments of developers have all contributed to the parlous state of the British dead in India.

A meeting of officials at the British High Commission in New Delhi this week heard that the situation had reached a critical stage.

Brig Ian Rees, the British defence attaché to India, said: "We have reached a point where if we - Britain and India - don't do something to preserve what remains, there will be nothing left to preserve."

There are estimated to be 700 to 1,000 British-era cemeteries across India that contain the remains of the men, women - and very often children - who died during the days of Empire.

Some are of obvious historical importance, while others tell a less dramatic story about the surgeons, subalterns and schoolmasters who populated everyday life in the Raj.

All are now laid equally low by the passage of time. In some cases there is nothing left to save. Rajpura Cemetery in Delhi, where British casualties of the 1857 Indian Mutiny were buried, is now covered by a housing estate.

Only the gateway arch and a granite memorial survive, the latter enclosed by the walls of a Baptist chapel opened in 1971 for poor Christian families who took up residence in the old cemetery.

"The place was a jungle at that time," said the chapel's pastor, Henrick James. "All the marble tablets were sold off to make benches and bathroom floors and houses were built over the land."

The marble is not always stolen for building. In the cemetery in Dagshai, north of Delhi, a statue of a woman and child was hacked to bits when a rumour circulated that anyone who owned a piece of it was guaranteed a male child.

In Delhi, the much larger Nicholson Cemetery remains intact, although India's voracious vegetation is winning a war of attrition with its few chowkidars, or caretakers.

The iron railings that enclose the grave of Brig John Nicholson - revered in Britain after he was killed during the storming of Delhi following the Mutiny - now provide a handy place for squatters to drip-dry their blue denims.

In Motihari, a provincial town in the deprived state of Bihar, the British-era graveyard was discovered submerged beneath a foot-deep tide of raw sewage.

There are no great heroes buried in Motihari, which holds only the graves of the petty officials, cuckolded wives and suicidal subalterns who still live in the pages of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills.

Among the headstones slowly sinking into the mire is the pathetic, child-sized memorial to Eileen May, the daughter of Anthony O'Reilly Edwards, who died aged "1yr, 2mths and 17 days" in May 1881.

Beside her lies Mr Edwards's "beloved wife", Caroline, who followed his daughter into the ground 18 months later in Dec 1882.

Of the broken-hearted Mr Edwards there is no sign.

The story of the neglect of India's graveyards begins in 1949 when Parliament voted a sum of £50,000 for their upkeep following Indian independence in 1947.

By 1960 the money had run out and by 1975, when Theon Wilkinson, a retired Gurkha officer visited India, the cemeteries were already in serious decline.

Mr Wilkinson formed Bacsa, the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, which survives on voluntary donations and for the last 30 years has largely been the graveyards' sole protector.

"The reality is that we have only limited resources," Mr Wilkinson said. "And this is a vast problem. We rely on volunteers and donations and do what we can."

In 1994 the British Government effectively washed its hands of the issue when the High Commission in New Delhi "delegated" the problem to local Cemetery Committees, many of which had ceased to exist in the years since independence.

However, attitudes seem to be changing. Mark Runacres, the deputy high commissioner, said it was impossible to ignore the appalling state of many cemeteries as he travelled around India.

"We recognise this as a genuine issue," he said. "These cemeteries are part of the history and heritage of both countries and we need to find a sustainable way of preserving key sites."

India's government has a poor record of preserving its cultural heritage - whether of the British Raj or the Mughal emperors - but it is hoped that non-governmental heritage organisations in India can be enlisted to help.

India's tourism industry also has a stake in maintaining the cemeteries, according to Rakesh Mathur, the president of the WelcomHeritage hotel group. He is also calling for action to preserve them before it is too late.

"These places need to be recognised as of joint importance to the history and national heritage of India and Britain," he said.

"We need to do something now, before they disappear altogether."

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Britons pay out to make corner of a foreign field fit for a hero
By Peter Foster in New Delhi
(Filed: 23/04/2005)

British businessmen in India are to pay for the restoration of the grave site of the greatest British hero of the Indian Mutiny after its dilapidated state was highlighted in The Daily Telegraph.

Brig Gen John Nicholson, who died after leading the assault on Delhi in August 1857, was described in official dispatches as a man whose "fame can never perish" so long as British rule endured in India.

However almost 60 years after Partition and the end of the British Raj, the cemetery in New Delhi that bears Nicholson's name is - like the majority of the 1,083 British-era graveyards in India - in a state of disrepair. Dense vegetation covers many of the graves, while destructive troops of rhesus monkeys have wrecked crosses and headstones. The iron railings that surround Nicholson's marble headstone are used as a rack for drying clothes.

But work gangs will begin work next week to clear the vegetation that is destroying the graves. Paths will be re-drawn and the boundary wall repaired. A langur monkey will be employed to patrol the cemetery for a month to scare away the smaller rhesus monkeys.

The 250,000 rupees (£3,125) restoration of the cemetery is part of a wider initiative to preserve colonial-era burial sites before they are lost forever to thieves, vandals and the elements. The British High Commission is also backing the preservation effort.

Graveyards such as the Nicholson Cemetery have fallen into disrepair partly because they fall outside the scope of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission which is responsible for maintaining only graves from the two world wars. Since 1974 a voluntary organisation, the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia has worked hard to preserve key cemeteries but, with limited funding, has been largely overwhelmed.

However next year, a retiring British Army officer, Lt Col Anthony Lake, plans to launch a charity, Grave Concern, devoted to the restoration and maintenance of British graves overseas. He estimates that he can raise a minimum of £600,000 a year and hopes that gap-year students will be involved in renovation projects.

"I want to stress this is not about glorifying old colonial history. It's about preserving a vital piece of social history for the generations to come," Col Lake said.

"These cemeteries are historical artefacts - I think of them as outdoor museums - telling stories about ordinary men and women."

The scale of the neglect of such cemeteries was, until recently, all too evident in Jhansi, a military town in central India. That was until late last year when Peggy Cantem, an octogenarian spinster, and another prominent local Anglo-Indian, Capt Roy Abbott, decided to act. The last straw for Mrs Cantem came when jackals started to dig up graves.

"Once I heard the jackals crunching on the bones of the dead," she said. "I have my own plot reserved in there and, I'm not afraid to admit, it wasn't the sort of place I'd want to be buried."

The cemetery has been reclaimed thanks to Mrs Cantem's fund-raising locally and among the Anglo-Indian community in Australia and Britain.

For this correspondent the interest was personal - the discovery of the grave of a great-uncle who, aged 25, was mauled by a tiger while hunting outside Jhansi in May 1935.

The family had long known of a plaque erected to his memory in a church in Meerut, but never the site of his grave.