November 25, 2015 • 29 mins
Sophia Duleep Singh's education was focused on turning her into a proper lady, in line with her status as a princess. But she also became deeply involved in the Women's Social and Political Union, a radical arm of the women's suffrage movement in Britain.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trade Phoebe Wilson. I'm Holly Fry. They we are
rejoining the story of Sophia Doo Leep singh Uh, a
princess from India who became a very vocal part of
(00:23):
the movement for women's suffrage in Britain. And at this
point in the story where we are picking up from
last time, she's living in Britain, her parents and her
little brother have sadly died, and she is seventeen and
effectively living off the goodwill of her godmother, Queen Victoria,
in spite of ongoing lessons in deportment. The teenage Sophia
(00:46):
was viewed as fragile, quiet, shy, sensitive, damaged from the
series of tragedies in her life, and very uncomfortable with
the attention that came along with being a princess. However,
being favored by the Queen meant that if she approached
her eighteenth birthday, plans were put in place for her
future and the futures of her two sisters and her
(01:07):
two half sisters. That's involved an income dowries for the
two oldest uh the two oldest sisters, and an official
coming out for Catherine Bomba and Sofia do leep Singh.
Faced with the prospect of having to look after herself,
Sofia really threw herself into her studies, both her academic
work and her deportment. She and her sisters also took
(01:29):
a tour of the continent, which grew from Sofia's then
surprising request to go to Germany to refine her skills
in the language. Accompanying the sisters were two ladies maids
and Lena Schaefer, their former governess who had stayed with
Sophia's older sisters while they were at university. In case
anyone who heard part one is confused, that is, the government,
(01:49):
the governess who came along after the nanny who had
looked at them when they were little, looked after them
when they were little, had died. Once the sisters arrived
back in Britain, Queen Victoria gave Sophia a grace and
favor residence at Faraday House at Hampton Court, and Hampton
Court was home to a number of mostly widows and
unmarried ladies who had some kind of standing in British society,
(02:13):
but usually no other place to live. Safia filled her
new home with music and animals, and now living independently,
she actually really started to blossom. But even though Sofia's
lessons had refined her behavior and her formal debut had
gone quite well, she didn't grow into quite to the
Indian British princess that the monarchy had hoped. Like her father,
(02:36):
she was extravagant, spending most of her income on clothes
and jewelry, and she became quite the social butterfly. She
also took up a whole lot of pastimes that were
not regarded as entirely appropriate for young ladies, against the
advice of doctors of the day, who thought they were
too exciting and could damage the reproductive organs. Sophia bought
(02:58):
a bicycle for herself and when on to make headlines
for her cycling. She also bred dogs, joining the Kennel
Club and becoming an extremely accomplished breeder. She bred and
showed Borzois and later Pomeranians as well. She also posed
with them for photographs, dressed in only the most fashionable clothing.
She was a very accomplished horseback rider. She smoked exotic Tobaccos.
(03:23):
She took her sister Bomba halfway around the world on
a on a covert mission to get her back to India,
because both sisters knew that the British government would never
give them permission to do so if they asked. And
when that mission didn't work, Bomba went to the United
States to try to become a doctor, although she had
to return to Britain when Northwestern University decided not to
(03:45):
let women study there anymore. Bomba was furious, so much
so that Catherine came back from Germany, where she had
been living with Lena Schaefer, to try to console her
bereft sister. This didn't really work. This was at this
point three grown young women sharing a household together, and
so Fire's behavior really rubbed her sisters the wrong way.
(04:07):
Catherine and Bomba hated her smoking, and they did not
like her dogs, and they really didn't want to socialize
with British aristocracy, which was one of Sophia's favorite pastimes.
I didn't like the dogs, man, That one's tough to
get through. Then, on January twenty, nineteen o one, as
is famously known, Queen Victoria died. The coronation of Edward
(04:30):
the seventh provided a distraction to the sisters and an
unexpected way to get back to India, like Bomba wanted
to do so desperately. And we're going to talk about
what happened in all of this arena after we paused
for a brief moment from one of our fabulous sponsors.
Now the story of how how Sophia and her sisters
did get to go back to India. As the monarch
(04:53):
of the British Empire, Edward the seventh would also be
the Emperor of India, and India prepared a derber, which
was an official reception to welcome the new king, or
what was really happening was his younger brother, who was
sent as his surrogate because he did not want to
go himself. The three Deleepe seeing sisters all applied to go,
(05:13):
and while their applications were denied, those denials were worded
in such a way that it seemed as though they
might go, but just later, not right now. They basically
decided it was later now, and they went themselves in secret.
They traveled under pseudonyms. They went separately so that there
would be less chance that they would raise suspicion, and
(05:34):
then once they got there, it was too late for
the British government to do anything about it, except for
to close off the normal diplomatic channels that they would
have had access to based on the fact that they
were princesses. So they wound up making their way to
Lahore and staying with people who remembered their father and
respected their family name. So initially, when they finally arrived
(05:56):
in India, the three sisters did travel together, but eventually
Sophia started a tour of India on horseback that her
sisters could simply not keep up with. They eventually returned
to Britain separately. On the way home, Sophia witnessed the
flight of Indian laborers and sailors known as laskers. These
are people who were often hired out of poverty and
(06:18):
then exploited. They were forced to work in dangerous and
degrading conditions, often without enough food or water to actually
sustain them, and then after the ships they were working
on reached often other continents, they generally would wind up
abandoned in port with no money, no resources, no work,
and sometimes not even an understanding of the local language.
(06:40):
So in so far I got home, she started using
her money and social connections to try to advocate for
better treatment for the Laskers. Although this work made her
feel useful, she really deeply missed her sisters. She became
increasingly morose and lonely until nineteen o six, three years
after she had left her sisters in India. That's she
got a letter from Bamba asking that she come back
(07:02):
to Lahore right away because someone was trying to kill her.
So so Fia did make it to Lahore as fast
as she could. However, she determined her sister was probably
not the target of poisoning by anybody. On the other hand,
she did determine that Bomba, who had been really resentful
of the British understandably for much of their lives, would
probably never come back to Britain to live again. She
(07:25):
had really made a home for herself in India. Bamba
had also started to make friends with the Movement for
Indian Self Governance. This was a growing movement led by
La La lajpat Ray, Gopa Krishna Gokhale and later Mohandas
karam Shand Gandhi also known as Mahatma As. This movement
for self government governance grew, violence broke out, and at
(07:49):
the same time so did a plague. So Fia took
to disinfecting their luggage repeatedly as they traveled. She taught
herself to write backwards in the hope that if anyone
found her journal, they wouldn't be able to read it
and learn of her sisters growing ties to the movement
for Indian Nationalism. So Fire returned to Britain in the
spring of nineteen o seven, and once there she once
(08:12):
again started to feel useless. However, in nineteen o eight
she became involved with the Women's Social and Political Union
or the WSPU. This was the most radical arm of
the movement for women's suffrage in Britain. All right, I
do want to make it clear that there were multiple
different organizations working for the cause of getting the right
(08:34):
to vote for women. This was the most radical of them.
So there's a misperception among some people that like the
entire movement was completely radical from beginning to end, and
people like to throw this around in sometimes a very
trollish kind of way on the Internet. There were lots
of different factors in the movement, as is the case
in basically every social movement in history. So I also
(08:56):
want to make it clear that at this point only
adult men who owned property could actually vote, so not
everyone who was male could vote, but zero women could vote.
Some of the other organizations that were working to get
women the right to vote included the National Union of
Women's Suffrage Societies, which was led by Milicent Fawcett, and
the Women's Franchise League. Also, we're going to be using
(09:17):
the words suffragette because this part of the movement really
owned that particular term, while others who were fighting for
the right for women to vote preferred the words suffragist.
Sophia started her work by raising funds, and then she
went to meetings in part to attract people who wanted
to see a princess, and soon she was a visible
figure in the WSPU, and its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst tried
(09:40):
to think of ways to put someone with Sofia's clout
and status to good use. The Suffragettes in general used
a lot of the same tactics we would think of
today when trying to advocate for change. They circulated petitions
and pamphlets, gave speeches, held rallies, and wrote letters, but
especially when it came to the WSPU. They also broke windows,
three rocks, and set things on fire, and engaged in
(10:02):
other more violent acts of destruction. The WSPU specifically decided
that these were legitimate protest strategies in nine nine that summer,
Marian Wallace Dunlop was the first suffragette to go on
a hunger strike, demanding to be recognized as a political prisoner.
After using a large rubber stamp to deface the main
(10:23):
entrance of Parliament, she was eventually freed when authorities feared
she would die of starvation otherwise. Other suffragettes started employing
the same technique. Eventually authorities turned to force feeding rather
than freeing hunger strikers. This is a pretty horrifying process
being forceped, and there were women in prison who were
forceped literally hundreds of times. Another aspect of the suffrage
(10:46):
movement handed on the fact that women had to pay
taxes but could not vote, so certainly back to the
idea of taxation without representation. The Women's Tax Resistance League
formed that October to protest this, and so fi A
join it as well. King Edward the Seventh died on
May sixth of nineteen ten, and he was succeeded by
(11:06):
George the Fifth, who was not nearly as invested in
the welfare of the dew leaps Sings as King Edward
or Queen Victoria had been. As Sofia's involvement in the
movement in the suffrage movement continued to grow and the
WSPU became more radical. King George would become increasingly suspicious
of her. And this is really when, uh, when Sophia's
(11:28):
involvement became tied to some of the most uh memorable
and sometimes horrifying parts of the movement for women's suffrage.
Shortly after Edward the seventh death, a conciliation bill was
introduced to the House of Commons. And if this bill
became law, it was going to give a limited number
of women, who were mostly women who owned property, the
right to vote. It did seem primes to become a law.
(11:51):
It looked like it was going to succeed, but then
a series of maneuvers by Prime Minister Herbert Henry Askwith
had stalled it and it suddenly seemed do to failure.
About three hundred suffragettes planned to protest on November eighteenth,
which was the day that Parliament was returning to session. However,
this protest did not go well. As the women approached,
(12:13):
a line of police cut them off and things quickly
became violent. Police man handled the protesters and knocked them down,
sometimes repeatedly. Women reported being groped, kicked, sexually assaulted, and
menaced by officers on horseback. Two women later died of
their injuries, and because at that time people believed being
hit in the breast could cause cancer, the ordeal was
(12:35):
also psychologically terrifying for many of the women who was
who were there long after the event was over. This
was the protest that became known as Black Friday, and
Sufia do leep Singh was there. She saw another woman
being thrown to the ground over and over and over
again by the same officer. Every time she would pull
(12:56):
herself back to her feet, only to be thrown down again.
So so I shoved her way through the crowd and
screamed at this officer until he dropped the woman and
backed away from her. After Sofia made sure this woman
wasn't seriously injured, she followed the officer, continuing to rate
him and had the presence of mind to note his
badge number. Sofia was one of the one hundred and
(13:18):
fifteen women and four men arrested after Black Friday. She
was charged with obstructing the police. Afterwards, so Fia wrote
to Winston Churchill, who was then the Home Secretary, describing
the police brutality that she had witnessed. Her note was
passed on to the Police Commissioner, who ultimately ruled the
officer had done nothing wrong, and Sofia disagreed with this intensely.
(13:43):
So she continued to write about it, sending more and
more letters and refusing to let the matter rest until
Winston Churchill put a note in her file dated December
sevent saying that she should not be answered anymore. On
February six, nineteen eleven, King George the Fifth was to
speak before Parliament as part of a planned protest that day,
(14:04):
Sofia threw herself in front of the Prime Minister's car
as it departed Downing Street, brandishing a banner that said
give women the vote this time. Perhaps because she was
Queen Victoria's god daughter and the Queen's grandson was the
one giving the speech, she was not arrested. The newspapers
had a field Day, though the queen's god daughter being
(14:24):
a suffragette and literally throwing herself in front of the
Prime Minister's car was big big news. During the nineteen
eleven senses many women in the suffrage movement refused to
be counted as another act of protest. So Fia was
one of these, writing no vote, no senses across her paperwork.
She then escalated her tax protest by refusing to pay
(14:46):
to license her dogs. She then refused to pay a
number of other fees related to her household and staff,
all because they were essentially taxes. When she was summoned
to the Petty Sessions court, she sent a lawyer who
read a state in which she said she would not
pay the fines or the fee the court levied on her.
Bailiffs came to sofi As house to collect the money
(15:08):
that was out. She said she would give it to
them as soon as she had the right to vote. Obviously,
they were not going to give her the rights of vote,
so the bailiffs took a diamond ring out of her
jewelry box, which was put up for auction. On the
day of the auction, suffragettes commandeered most of the seats
in the auction house, and they all refused to bid
on so far as ring, which meant the auctioneer had
(15:30):
to keep reopening the bid at lower and lower dollar
amounts until finally it reached the sum of ten pounds.
That's when artist Louise jopling Row bought it for that
ten pounds, then handed it to Sofia who was in
the auction house, and all of the Suffragettes and attendance
basically had a big party. Sofia became ever closer to
(15:51):
Emmiline Pankhurst and the other leaders of the WSPU in
the years that followed. After Pankhurst returned from a trip
to the US, in the WUSPU took another turn towards
the militant. They smashed the windows of the Royal Courts
of Justice with hammers, along with the windows of other buildings,
and they set things on fire. This increasing militancy lost
(16:12):
them some support in Parliament and a second conciliation bill
started to flounder. The violence escalated from there, with the
Suffragettes making small bombs and ruining the mail. Other organizations
within the movement came to increasingly criticize the wsp USED
tactics and distanced themselves from them because they thought they
were their actions are beginning to affect ordinary citizens, not
(16:36):
just government officials. Sofia, though, supported the WSPU wholeheartedly, and
fighting down a fear of public speaking that had previously
prevented her from accepting request to speak at rallies and meetings,
she began to appear on stage to show this support.
Her support of the WSPU never wavered even when their
favored protest technique turned to arson. So Fia all so
(17:00):
started selling the WSPU newspaper, which was called The Suffragette,
outside the gates of Hampton Court Palace. Remember that's where
her Grace and Favor apartment was. And uh, to King
George's mind, this was kind of the last straw. He
started trying to figure out if there was some way
he could have victed her. At that point, Emily Davidson
(17:20):
had martyred herself by throwing her body in front of
his horse during a race, and arsonists had burned down
the King's stand at the racetrack. So he was getting
a little tired of suffragettes and there what maybe was
you that nonsense? However, he also knew that no matter
how they tried to spin it, evicting his grandmother's god
(17:41):
daughter from her grace and favors apartment would look really bad. Instead,
they closed the picture galleries at Hampton Court to cut
down on the number of visitors in the area, which
had a trickle down effect that was devastating to local businesses.
Sofia persisted, seeming determined to be arrested. Yes, she really
did stuff that was way way worse than a lot
(18:02):
of other people, seeming bent on getting arrested, and naturally,
because she was a princess, they were very reluctant to
arrest her. So finally, though, she did get arrested for
unpaid taxes, and she went through that whole cycle we
already saw of going to court, having her jewelry sees
to pay for it, and having that go up for
(18:23):
auction one more time. The Suffragettes went to the auction
house on the day of the auction and they bought
Sofia's necklace, even though this time the auctioneer refused to
lower the starting bid in response to their refusal to
bid on it. Safia remained a steadfast supporter of the
WSPU until Britain entered World War One, the movement for
(18:44):
women's suffrage continued, but the WSPU ended its militant activities
at that time. Sofia also really had other things to
worry about at that point, and we will talk about
them after one more brief sponsor break. When World War
One began, so Fias this Katherine was still in Germany.
She had lived there at this point for a really
(19:04):
long time, and she had also expressed, unsurprisingly some pro
German sentiments. So no matter how she tried, so Fia
could not convince British officials to help her get her
sister out of Germany in spite of the threat of war. Instead,
in nineteen fifteen, Sofia became a Red Cross nurse, primarily
looking after the many Indian men who were deployed to
(19:27):
Europe and were wounded in action. She also started raising
funds for the Red Crosses efforts to help the Indian troops. Also,
in nineteen fifteen, Bomba wrote to her sisters tell them
she had gotten married in India. Eventually, Sofia started trying
to plan a massive fundraiser to help the Indian soldiers. However,
her past came back to haunt. Her officials were distrustful
(19:49):
of her, and they were reluctant to give her the
go ahead. It took months for the plan to finally
be approved, and the fundraiser, now known as India Day,
was scheduled for September twenty nine, eighteen. Sadly, a few
months earlier, on June eighth of that year, so Fire
received a telegram that her eldest brother, Victor, had died
of a heart attack in France. So Fia had to
(20:10):
carry on with her fundraising effort in the midst of
her grief. Fortunately, the fundraiser went off beautifully and she
raised enough money to pay for about fifty thousand huts
to provide housing to Indian soldiers. And then the war ended.
Not too much longer after that, Sofia finally made contact
with her sister after many attempts to get a passport
(20:30):
for her. Although Lena Schaefer was ill and malnourished, Catherine
did make arrangements to visit Britain. At this point, the
movement for Indian nationalism was also on the rise back
in India. The dow Leep Singh name didn't have nearly
the same recognition or prestige in India that had had
it had had in earlier years, So the India Office
(20:53):
became less particularly compelled to make sure people in India
knew that the dou leep Singh family was being treated well.
The surviving family members gradually got less and less help
from the India Office. Sofia's money became scarce. Eventually she
could no longer even afford to heat her home. In
nineteen eighteen, women over thirty who were householders, as well
(21:15):
as a few others, were given the right to vote
in Britain. In the years following that, Sophia became less
and less able to make ends meet. Her brother hired
her a new housekeeper named Bosi, hoping to ease some
of Sofia's burdens and also keep the house running within
her means. The two women became friends, although their relationship
(21:35):
could be stormy, and Sofia eventually became godmother to Bosie's daughter.
Sofia's brother, Freddie, died following a heart attack in August
of ninety six at the age of fifty eight. Her
half sister Irene committed suicide in nine Both Bomba and
their other half, sister Pauline, contested Irene's will in a
(21:57):
battle that was both public and very ugly, and this
was really embarrassing to Sepia, as Irene had left all
her money to a home for unwanted children, so her
relationship to Pauline and Bomba was never really very comfortable. Again. Yeah,
she was also the only one of her sisters who
had ever really tried to befriend the younger half sisters.
(22:17):
Catherine and Bomba were both understandably bitter about their father's
new family. Two years after that whole affair with the
will was settled in, women in Britain were given the
right to vote, following the same terms as those that
applied to men, which was an extension of the rights
that had been granted in nineteen eighteen. Lena Schaeffer died
(22:38):
on August six, nineteen thirty eight. Katherine doo Leep Singh
elected to remain in Germany until Hitler's rise made it
unsafe for her to stay there. She and Lena had
lived very frugally, so she had money to live on.
She returned to a house she owned in England and
asked Sophia to come live in a bungalow on the property.
Some years later. Sophia's half sister, Pauline, died that on
(23:00):
April tenth, nineteen forty one, although after the falling out
with her family after the other half sister, Irene's will,
this was actually unknown until relatively recently. She had just
kind of faded from the from the map Catherine dined
following a heart attack in nineteen forty two. After her
sister's death, so Fia became increasingly depressed. She had housed
(23:23):
several children during the Blitz, but by ninety three they
had all gone home. Her god daughter, Drovna became one
of her sole comforts, was actually still living as of
I'm not totally sure about whether she's still living today.
Sofia de leep, saying lived long enough to see women
in Britain get the right to vote, to see India
(23:44):
become independent, and to see part of the former Seat
Kingdom partitioned into Pakistan, but she had little to occupy
her mind or her time. As she got older and
her health was increasingly poor. She developed a tumor behind
her eye that she refused to have treated, even though
it caused her an incredible amount of pain. She died
in her sleep on August twenty at the age of
(24:07):
seventy one. Although she had remained Christian all of her life,
Sofia opted for a seek cremation, with her ashes to
be scattered in India. This duty fell to her last
surviving sister, Bomba, who was by then in her eighties.
Then Bomba died in nineteen fifty seven. That is a
story of suffied do leap sing And I'm serious. If
(24:29):
this is interesting to you at all, read the book
so Fi a Princess, Suffragette Revolutionary by Anita and on.
It goes into all kinds of things we haven't really
touched on here, mostly for the sake of time. It
gets into a lot more about the movement for Indian
independence and how that had parallels to the movement for
women's suffrage. It has tons more detail about the lives
(24:53):
of Sofia and her sister's and her father. It's really
an enjoyable read. It was obviously one of the sources
used in this episode. Um and if you like her story,
there's so much more of it in there. Do you
have some fabulous listener mail to polish off this fascinating
tale to you. It's from Rick and it's also really fascinating.
(25:16):
Rick says, Hi, Tracy, and Holly, I was listening to
your podcast on redlining, and you mentioned in passing that
the f H loans didn't allow farming, but there were
separate loans for farmers. I've been doing a bunch of
research on homesteadying lately and have a little more info
on that point. I thought y'all might want to know.
Here's an expert excerpt from a book called Urban Farming,
(25:37):
written by Thomas J. Fox. Quote. Some fifty thousand hogs
lived in Manhattan until about eighteen sixty. About seven percent
of Seattleites owned cows in nineteen hundred, including the majority
in North Seattle neighborhoods. A nineteen or six census of
chickens in urban areas found on average, one clucker for
every two city dwellers. That's the end of that quote,
(26:00):
I think. In a nineteen thirty two Los Angeles Times
article titled There's No Room for Her, the writer estimated
the goat milk population of Los Angeles County at two thousand,
seven hundred, an amount that would be over twelve thousand
today if maintained at the same per capital letter level.
As late as nineteen forty a census of agriculture counted
(26:23):
three d fifty two milk cows in Brooklyn, two five
hundred sixty two in Washington, d c. And fifteen thousand,
six hundred thirty eight in Dallas County, Texas. Clearly, our
urban life has changed. I want to be clear, I'm
not completely sure where in that part the quoted material ended,
but it's definitely over by this part. Closely related to
(26:44):
the disappearance of urban agriculture and American cities has been
the self image of a progressive, commercially minded middle class
and its idea of how a city should look, aided
of course by the advent of refrigeration and cheap transportation.
Those to suffer, of course, we're often the poor, immigrants
and minority groups who lived live closer to the subsistence
level brown notes than In the nine twenties and nineteen thirties,
(27:07):
urban livestock were specifically excluded by restrictive covenants in developing
whites only Seattle neighborhoods, and that Federal Housing Administration loans
UH applications from the nineteen thirties also banned livestock in
a national level. I just realized I'm not actually sure
where the quote ends. It might not be until the
very end of this thing that I just said. So
(27:28):
it seems this part now I'm totally sure, is Rick's note.
So it seems that f h A enabled red lighting
is also responsible for much of the food desertification of
inner city neighborhoods as well. Thanks for your awesome podcasts.
They make my long commute much more enjoyable, Rick, This
letter is fascinating for two reasons. One, I had no
idea of any of that. Too. During the Great Depression,
(27:52):
my grandmother, her father was a Methodist preacher and their
parsonage was within the city limits of the city of
Winston Salem, and they kept getting in trouble for keeping
pigs on the parsonage property. And we were sort of like,
it is the Great Depression, and I'm a preacher, what
do you want me to do? So thank you Rick
(28:17):
for writing us this often letter. If you would like
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Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook
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learn lots of cool stuff, come to our parent company website,
(28:38):
which is how stuff works dot com. There's all kinds
of stuff about all kinds of subjects, and then our website,
how stuff works dot com is full of show notes.
We're going to have a nice link to the book
that I have talked about in both parts of these episodes,
so you can have a look at that yourself if
you were interested in that. We also have archive of
every episode ever. Lots of cool stuff on our website,
(28:59):
so you can all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or mid them history
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because it has stuff works dot com. M m
hm h
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trade Phoebe Wilson. I'm Holly Fry. They we are
rejoining the story of Sophia Doo Leep singh Uh, a
princess from India who became a very vocal part of
(00:23):
the movement for women's suffrage in Britain. And at this
point in the story where we are picking up from
last time, she's living in Britain, her parents and her
little brother have sadly died, and she is seventeen and
effectively living off the goodwill of her godmother, Queen Victoria,
in spite of ongoing lessons in deportment. The teenage Sophia
(00:46):
was viewed as fragile, quiet, shy, sensitive, damaged from the
series of tragedies in her life, and very uncomfortable with
the attention that came along with being a princess. However,
being favored by the Queen meant that if she approached
her eighteenth birthday, plans were put in place for her
future and the futures of her two sisters and her
(01:07):
two half sisters. That's involved an income dowries for the
two oldest uh the two oldest sisters, and an official
coming out for Catherine Bomba and Sofia do leep Singh.
Faced with the prospect of having to look after herself,
Sofia really threw herself into her studies, both her academic
work and her deportment. She and her sisters also took
(01:29):
a tour of the continent, which grew from Sofia's then
surprising request to go to Germany to refine her skills
in the language. Accompanying the sisters were two ladies maids
and Lena Schaefer, their former governess who had stayed with
Sophia's older sisters while they were at university. In case
anyone who heard part one is confused, that is, the government,
(01:49):
the governess who came along after the nanny who had
looked at them when they were little, looked after them
when they were little, had died. Once the sisters arrived
back in Britain, Queen Victoria gave Sophia a grace and
favor residence at Faraday House at Hampton Court, and Hampton
Court was home to a number of mostly widows and
unmarried ladies who had some kind of standing in British society,
(02:13):
but usually no other place to live. Safia filled her
new home with music and animals, and now living independently,
she actually really started to blossom. But even though Sofia's
lessons had refined her behavior and her formal debut had
gone quite well, she didn't grow into quite to the
Indian British princess that the monarchy had hoped. Like her father,
(02:36):
she was extravagant, spending most of her income on clothes
and jewelry, and she became quite the social butterfly. She
also took up a whole lot of pastimes that were
not regarded as entirely appropriate for young ladies, against the
advice of doctors of the day, who thought they were
too exciting and could damage the reproductive organs. Sophia bought
(02:58):
a bicycle for herself and when on to make headlines
for her cycling. She also bred dogs, joining the Kennel
Club and becoming an extremely accomplished breeder. She bred and
showed Borzois and later Pomeranians as well. She also posed
with them for photographs, dressed in only the most fashionable clothing.
She was a very accomplished horseback rider. She smoked exotic Tobaccos.
(03:23):
She took her sister Bomba halfway around the world on
a on a covert mission to get her back to India,
because both sisters knew that the British government would never
give them permission to do so if they asked. And
when that mission didn't work, Bomba went to the United
States to try to become a doctor, although she had
to return to Britain when Northwestern University decided not to
(03:45):
let women study there anymore. Bomba was furious, so much
so that Catherine came back from Germany, where she had
been living with Lena Schaefer, to try to console her
bereft sister. This didn't really work. This was at this
point three grown young women sharing a household together, and
so Fire's behavior really rubbed her sisters the wrong way.
(04:07):
Catherine and Bomba hated her smoking, and they did not
like her dogs, and they really didn't want to socialize
with British aristocracy, which was one of Sophia's favorite pastimes.
I didn't like the dogs, man, That one's tough to
get through. Then, on January twenty, nineteen o one, as
is famously known, Queen Victoria died. The coronation of Edward
(04:30):
the seventh provided a distraction to the sisters and an
unexpected way to get back to India, like Bomba wanted
to do so desperately. And we're going to talk about
what happened in all of this arena after we paused
for a brief moment from one of our fabulous sponsors.
Now the story of how how Sophia and her sisters
did get to go back to India. As the monarch
(04:53):
of the British Empire, Edward the seventh would also be
the Emperor of India, and India prepared a derber, which
was an official reception to welcome the new king, or
what was really happening was his younger brother, who was
sent as his surrogate because he did not want to
go himself. The three Deleepe seeing sisters all applied to go,
(05:13):
and while their applications were denied, those denials were worded
in such a way that it seemed as though they
might go, but just later, not right now. They basically
decided it was later now, and they went themselves in secret.
They traveled under pseudonyms. They went separately so that there
would be less chance that they would raise suspicion, and
(05:34):
then once they got there, it was too late for
the British government to do anything about it, except for
to close off the normal diplomatic channels that they would
have had access to based on the fact that they
were princesses. So they wound up making their way to
Lahore and staying with people who remembered their father and
respected their family name. So initially, when they finally arrived
(05:56):
in India, the three sisters did travel together, but eventually
Sophia started a tour of India on horseback that her
sisters could simply not keep up with. They eventually returned
to Britain separately. On the way home, Sophia witnessed the
flight of Indian laborers and sailors known as laskers. These
are people who were often hired out of poverty and
(06:18):
then exploited. They were forced to work in dangerous and
degrading conditions, often without enough food or water to actually
sustain them, and then after the ships they were working
on reached often other continents, they generally would wind up
abandoned in port with no money, no resources, no work,
and sometimes not even an understanding of the local language.
(06:40):
So in so far I got home, she started using
her money and social connections to try to advocate for
better treatment for the Laskers. Although this work made her
feel useful, she really deeply missed her sisters. She became
increasingly morose and lonely until nineteen o six, three years
after she had left her sisters in India. That's she
got a letter from Bamba asking that she come back
(07:02):
to Lahore right away because someone was trying to kill her.
So so Fia did make it to Lahore as fast
as she could. However, she determined her sister was probably
not the target of poisoning by anybody. On the other hand,
she did determine that Bomba, who had been really resentful
of the British understandably for much of their lives, would
probably never come back to Britain to live again. She
(07:25):
had really made a home for herself in India. Bamba
had also started to make friends with the Movement for
Indian Self Governance. This was a growing movement led by
La La lajpat Ray, Gopa Krishna Gokhale and later Mohandas
karam Shand Gandhi also known as Mahatma As. This movement
for self government governance grew, violence broke out, and at
(07:49):
the same time so did a plague. So Fia took
to disinfecting their luggage repeatedly as they traveled. She taught
herself to write backwards in the hope that if anyone
found her journal, they wouldn't be able to read it
and learn of her sisters growing ties to the movement
for Indian Nationalism. So Fire returned to Britain in the
spring of nineteen o seven, and once there she once
(08:12):
again started to feel useless. However, in nineteen o eight
she became involved with the Women's Social and Political Union
or the WSPU. This was the most radical arm of
the movement for women's suffrage in Britain. All right, I
do want to make it clear that there were multiple
different organizations working for the cause of getting the right
(08:34):
to vote for women. This was the most radical of them.
So there's a misperception among some people that like the
entire movement was completely radical from beginning to end, and
people like to throw this around in sometimes a very
trollish kind of way on the Internet. There were lots
of different factors in the movement, as is the case
in basically every social movement in history. So I also
(08:56):
want to make it clear that at this point only
adult men who owned property could actually vote, so not
everyone who was male could vote, but zero women could vote.
Some of the other organizations that were working to get
women the right to vote included the National Union of
Women's Suffrage Societies, which was led by Milicent Fawcett, and
the Women's Franchise League. Also, we're going to be using
(09:17):
the words suffragette because this part of the movement really
owned that particular term, while others who were fighting for
the right for women to vote preferred the words suffragist.
Sophia started her work by raising funds, and then she
went to meetings in part to attract people who wanted
to see a princess, and soon she was a visible
figure in the WSPU, and its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst tried
(09:40):
to think of ways to put someone with Sofia's clout
and status to good use. The Suffragettes in general used
a lot of the same tactics we would think of
today when trying to advocate for change. They circulated petitions
and pamphlets, gave speeches, held rallies, and wrote letters, but
especially when it came to the WSPU. They also broke windows,
three rocks, and set things on fire, and engaged in
(10:02):
other more violent acts of destruction. The WSPU specifically decided
that these were legitimate protest strategies in nine nine that summer,
Marian Wallace Dunlop was the first suffragette to go on
a hunger strike, demanding to be recognized as a political prisoner.
After using a large rubber stamp to deface the main
(10:23):
entrance of Parliament, she was eventually freed when authorities feared
she would die of starvation otherwise. Other suffragettes started employing
the same technique. Eventually authorities turned to force feeding rather
than freeing hunger strikers. This is a pretty horrifying process
being forceped, and there were women in prison who were
forceped literally hundreds of times. Another aspect of the suffrage
(10:46):
movement handed on the fact that women had to pay
taxes but could not vote, so certainly back to the
idea of taxation without representation. The Women's Tax Resistance League
formed that October to protest this, and so fi A
join it as well. King Edward the Seventh died on
May sixth of nineteen ten, and he was succeeded by
(11:06):
George the Fifth, who was not nearly as invested in
the welfare of the dew leaps Sings as King Edward
or Queen Victoria had been. As Sofia's involvement in the
movement in the suffrage movement continued to grow and the
WSPU became more radical. King George would become increasingly suspicious
of her. And this is really when, uh, when Sophia's
(11:28):
involvement became tied to some of the most uh memorable
and sometimes horrifying parts of the movement for women's suffrage.
Shortly after Edward the seventh death, a conciliation bill was
introduced to the House of Commons. And if this bill
became law, it was going to give a limited number
of women, who were mostly women who owned property, the
right to vote. It did seem primes to become a law.
(11:51):
It looked like it was going to succeed, but then
a series of maneuvers by Prime Minister Herbert Henry Askwith
had stalled it and it suddenly seemed do to failure.
About three hundred suffragettes planned to protest on November eighteenth,
which was the day that Parliament was returning to session. However,
this protest did not go well. As the women approached,
(12:13):
a line of police cut them off and things quickly
became violent. Police man handled the protesters and knocked them down,
sometimes repeatedly. Women reported being groped, kicked, sexually assaulted, and
menaced by officers on horseback. Two women later died of
their injuries, and because at that time people believed being
hit in the breast could cause cancer, the ordeal was
(12:35):
also psychologically terrifying for many of the women who was
who were there long after the event was over. This
was the protest that became known as Black Friday, and
Sufia do leep Singh was there. She saw another woman
being thrown to the ground over and over and over
again by the same officer. Every time she would pull
(12:56):
herself back to her feet, only to be thrown down again.
So so I shoved her way through the crowd and
screamed at this officer until he dropped the woman and
backed away from her. After Sofia made sure this woman
wasn't seriously injured, she followed the officer, continuing to rate
him and had the presence of mind to note his
badge number. Sofia was one of the one hundred and
(13:18):
fifteen women and four men arrested after Black Friday. She
was charged with obstructing the police. Afterwards, so Fia wrote
to Winston Churchill, who was then the Home Secretary, describing
the police brutality that she had witnessed. Her note was
passed on to the Police Commissioner, who ultimately ruled the
officer had done nothing wrong, and Sofia disagreed with this intensely.
(13:43):
So she continued to write about it, sending more and
more letters and refusing to let the matter rest until
Winston Churchill put a note in her file dated December
sevent saying that she should not be answered anymore. On
February six, nineteen eleven, King George the Fifth was to
speak before Parliament as part of a planned protest that day,
(14:04):
Sofia threw herself in front of the Prime Minister's car
as it departed Downing Street, brandishing a banner that said
give women the vote this time. Perhaps because she was
Queen Victoria's god daughter and the Queen's grandson was the
one giving the speech, she was not arrested. The newspapers
had a field Day, though the queen's god daughter being
(14:24):
a suffragette and literally throwing herself in front of the
Prime Minister's car was big big news. During the nineteen
eleven senses many women in the suffrage movement refused to
be counted as another act of protest. So Fia was
one of these, writing no vote, no senses across her paperwork.
She then escalated her tax protest by refusing to pay
(14:46):
to license her dogs. She then refused to pay a
number of other fees related to her household and staff,
all because they were essentially taxes. When she was summoned
to the Petty Sessions court, she sent a lawyer who
read a state in which she said she would not
pay the fines or the fee the court levied on her.
Bailiffs came to sofi As house to collect the money
(15:08):
that was out. She said she would give it to
them as soon as she had the right to vote. Obviously,
they were not going to give her the rights of vote,
so the bailiffs took a diamond ring out of her
jewelry box, which was put up for auction. On the
day of the auction, suffragettes commandeered most of the seats
in the auction house, and they all refused to bid
on so far as ring, which meant the auctioneer had
(15:30):
to keep reopening the bid at lower and lower dollar
amounts until finally it reached the sum of ten pounds.
That's when artist Louise jopling Row bought it for that
ten pounds, then handed it to Sofia who was in
the auction house, and all of the Suffragettes and attendance
basically had a big party. Sofia became ever closer to
(15:51):
Emmiline Pankhurst and the other leaders of the WSPU in
the years that followed. After Pankhurst returned from a trip
to the US, in the WUSPU took another turn towards
the militant. They smashed the windows of the Royal Courts
of Justice with hammers, along with the windows of other buildings,
and they set things on fire. This increasing militancy lost
(16:12):
them some support in Parliament and a second conciliation bill
started to flounder. The violence escalated from there, with the
Suffragettes making small bombs and ruining the mail. Other organizations
within the movement came to increasingly criticize the wsp USED
tactics and distanced themselves from them because they thought they
were their actions are beginning to affect ordinary citizens, not
(16:36):
just government officials. Sofia, though, supported the WSPU wholeheartedly, and
fighting down a fear of public speaking that had previously
prevented her from accepting request to speak at rallies and meetings,
she began to appear on stage to show this support.
Her support of the WSPU never wavered even when their
favored protest technique turned to arson. So Fia all so
(17:00):
started selling the WSPU newspaper, which was called The Suffragette,
outside the gates of Hampton Court Palace. Remember that's where
her Grace and Favor apartment was. And uh, to King
George's mind, this was kind of the last straw. He
started trying to figure out if there was some way
he could have victed her. At that point, Emily Davidson
(17:20):
had martyred herself by throwing her body in front of
his horse during a race, and arsonists had burned down
the King's stand at the racetrack. So he was getting
a little tired of suffragettes and there what maybe was
you that nonsense? However, he also knew that no matter
how they tried to spin it, evicting his grandmother's god
(17:41):
daughter from her grace and favors apartment would look really bad. Instead,
they closed the picture galleries at Hampton Court to cut
down on the number of visitors in the area, which
had a trickle down effect that was devastating to local businesses.
Sofia persisted, seeming determined to be arrested. Yes, she really
did stuff that was way way worse than a lot
(18:02):
of other people, seeming bent on getting arrested, and naturally,
because she was a princess, they were very reluctant to
arrest her. So finally, though, she did get arrested for
unpaid taxes, and she went through that whole cycle we
already saw of going to court, having her jewelry sees
to pay for it, and having that go up for
(18:23):
auction one more time. The Suffragettes went to the auction
house on the day of the auction and they bought
Sofia's necklace, even though this time the auctioneer refused to
lower the starting bid in response to their refusal to
bid on it. Safia remained a steadfast supporter of the
WSPU until Britain entered World War One, the movement for
(18:44):
women's suffrage continued, but the WSPU ended its militant activities
at that time. Sofia also really had other things to
worry about at that point, and we will talk about
them after one more brief sponsor break. When World War
One began, so Fias this Katherine was still in Germany.
She had lived there at this point for a really
(19:04):
long time, and she had also expressed, unsurprisingly some pro
German sentiments. So no matter how she tried, so Fia
could not convince British officials to help her get her
sister out of Germany in spite of the threat of war. Instead,
in nineteen fifteen, Sofia became a Red Cross nurse, primarily
looking after the many Indian men who were deployed to
(19:27):
Europe and were wounded in action. She also started raising
funds for the Red Crosses efforts to help the Indian troops. Also,
in nineteen fifteen, Bomba wrote to her sisters tell them
she had gotten married in India. Eventually, Sofia started trying
to plan a massive fundraiser to help the Indian soldiers. However,
her past came back to haunt. Her officials were distrustful
(19:49):
of her, and they were reluctant to give her the
go ahead. It took months for the plan to finally
be approved, and the fundraiser, now known as India Day,
was scheduled for September twenty nine, eighteen. Sadly, a few
months earlier, on June eighth of that year, so Fire
received a telegram that her eldest brother, Victor, had died
of a heart attack in France. So Fia had to
(20:10):
carry on with her fundraising effort in the midst of
her grief. Fortunately, the fundraiser went off beautifully and she
raised enough money to pay for about fifty thousand huts
to provide housing to Indian soldiers. And then the war ended.
Not too much longer after that, Sofia finally made contact
with her sister after many attempts to get a passport
(20:30):
for her. Although Lena Schaefer was ill and malnourished, Catherine
did make arrangements to visit Britain. At this point, the
movement for Indian nationalism was also on the rise back
in India. The dow Leep Singh name didn't have nearly
the same recognition or prestige in India that had had
it had had in earlier years, So the India Office
(20:53):
became less particularly compelled to make sure people in India
knew that the dou leep Singh family was being treated well.
The surviving family members gradually got less and less help
from the India Office. Sofia's money became scarce. Eventually she
could no longer even afford to heat her home. In
nineteen eighteen, women over thirty who were householders, as well
(21:15):
as a few others, were given the right to vote
in Britain. In the years following that, Sophia became less
and less able to make ends meet. Her brother hired
her a new housekeeper named Bosi, hoping to ease some
of Sofia's burdens and also keep the house running within
her means. The two women became friends, although their relationship
(21:35):
could be stormy, and Sofia eventually became godmother to Bosie's daughter.
Sofia's brother, Freddie, died following a heart attack in August
of ninety six at the age of fifty eight. Her
half sister Irene committed suicide in nine Both Bomba and
their other half, sister Pauline, contested Irene's will in a
(21:57):
battle that was both public and very ugly, and this
was really embarrassing to Sepia, as Irene had left all
her money to a home for unwanted children, so her
relationship to Pauline and Bomba was never really very comfortable. Again. Yeah,
she was also the only one of her sisters who
had ever really tried to befriend the younger half sisters.
(22:17):
Catherine and Bomba were both understandably bitter about their father's
new family. Two years after that whole affair with the
will was settled in, women in Britain were given the
right to vote, following the same terms as those that
applied to men, which was an extension of the rights
that had been granted in nineteen eighteen. Lena Schaeffer died
(22:38):
on August six, nineteen thirty eight. Katherine doo Leep Singh
elected to remain in Germany until Hitler's rise made it
unsafe for her to stay there. She and Lena had
lived very frugally, so she had money to live on.
She returned to a house she owned in England and
asked Sophia to come live in a bungalow on the property.
Some years later. Sophia's half sister, Pauline, died that on
(23:00):
April tenth, nineteen forty one, although after the falling out
with her family after the other half sister, Irene's will,
this was actually unknown until relatively recently. She had just
kind of faded from the from the map Catherine dined
following a heart attack in nineteen forty two. After her
sister's death, so Fia became increasingly depressed. She had housed
(23:23):
several children during the Blitz, but by ninety three they
had all gone home. Her god daughter, Drovna became one
of her sole comforts, was actually still living as of
I'm not totally sure about whether she's still living today.
Sofia de leep, saying lived long enough to see women
in Britain get the right to vote, to see India
(23:44):
become independent, and to see part of the former Seat
Kingdom partitioned into Pakistan, but she had little to occupy
her mind or her time. As she got older and
her health was increasingly poor. She developed a tumor behind
her eye that she refused to have treated, even though
it caused her an incredible amount of pain. She died
in her sleep on August twenty at the age of
(24:07):
seventy one. Although she had remained Christian all of her life,
Sofia opted for a seek cremation, with her ashes to
be scattered in India. This duty fell to her last
surviving sister, Bomba, who was by then in her eighties.
Then Bomba died in nineteen fifty seven. That is a
story of suffied do leap sing And I'm serious. If
(24:29):
this is interesting to you at all, read the book
so Fi a Princess, Suffragette Revolutionary by Anita and on.
It goes into all kinds of things we haven't really
touched on here, mostly for the sake of time. It
gets into a lot more about the movement for Indian
independence and how that had parallels to the movement for
women's suffrage. It has tons more detail about the lives
(24:53):
of Sofia and her sister's and her father. It's really
an enjoyable read. It was obviously one of the sources
used in this episode. Um and if you like her story,
there's so much more of it in there. Do you
have some fabulous listener mail to polish off this fascinating
tale to you. It's from Rick and it's also really fascinating.
(25:16):
Rick says, Hi, Tracy, and Holly, I was listening to
your podcast on redlining, and you mentioned in passing that
the f H loans didn't allow farming, but there were
separate loans for farmers. I've been doing a bunch of
research on homesteadying lately and have a little more info
on that point. I thought y'all might want to know.
Here's an expert excerpt from a book called Urban Farming,
(25:37):
written by Thomas J. Fox. Quote. Some fifty thousand hogs
lived in Manhattan until about eighteen sixty. About seven percent
of Seattleites owned cows in nineteen hundred, including the majority
in North Seattle neighborhoods. A nineteen or six census of
chickens in urban areas found on average, one clucker for
every two city dwellers. That's the end of that quote,
(26:00):
I think. In a nineteen thirty two Los Angeles Times
article titled There's No Room for Her, the writer estimated
the goat milk population of Los Angeles County at two thousand,
seven hundred, an amount that would be over twelve thousand
today if maintained at the same per capital letter level.
As late as nineteen forty a census of agriculture counted
(26:23):
three d fifty two milk cows in Brooklyn, two five
hundred sixty two in Washington, d c. And fifteen thousand,
six hundred thirty eight in Dallas County, Texas. Clearly, our
urban life has changed. I want to be clear, I'm
not completely sure where in that part the quoted material ended,
but it's definitely over by this part. Closely related to
(26:44):
the disappearance of urban agriculture and American cities has been
the self image of a progressive, commercially minded middle class
and its idea of how a city should look, aided
of course by the advent of refrigeration and cheap transportation.
Those to suffer, of course, we're often the poor, immigrants
and minority groups who lived live closer to the subsistence
level brown notes than In the nine twenties and nineteen thirties,
(27:07):
urban livestock were specifically excluded by restrictive covenants in developing
whites only Seattle neighborhoods, and that Federal Housing Administration loans
UH applications from the nineteen thirties also banned livestock in
a national level. I just realized I'm not actually sure
where the quote ends. It might not be until the
very end of this thing that I just said. So
(27:28):
it seems this part now I'm totally sure, is Rick's note.
So it seems that f h A enabled red lighting
is also responsible for much of the food desertification of
inner city neighborhoods as well. Thanks for your awesome podcasts.
They make my long commute much more enjoyable, Rick, This
letter is fascinating for two reasons. One, I had no
idea of any of that. Too. During the Great Depression,
(27:52):
my grandmother, her father was a Methodist preacher and their
parsonage was within the city limits of the city of
Winston Salem, and they kept getting in trouble for keeping
pigs on the parsonage property. And we were sort of like,
it is the Great Depression, and I'm a preacher, what
do you want me to do? So thank you Rick
(28:17):
for writing us this often letter. If you would like
to write to us, We're at History Podcasts at how
Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook
dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at
miss in History. Are tumbler is miss in history dot
tum dot com and we're also on Panterrist at pentrist
dot com, slash miss in history. You would like to
learn lots of cool stuff, come to our parent company website,
(28:38):
which is how stuff works dot com. There's all kinds
of stuff about all kinds of subjects, and then our website,
how stuff works dot com is full of show notes.
We're going to have a nice link to the book
that I have talked about in both parts of these episodes,
so you can have a look at that yourself if
you were interested in that. We also have archive of
every episode ever. Lots of cool stuff on our website,
(28:59):
so you can all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or mid them history
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because it has stuff works dot com. M m
hm h
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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