Ludlow Castle was demolished in the late 1960s. It owed its inception to Dr Samuel George Ludlow, surgeon of the East India Company days, at a time when the likes of William Fraser and Col Skinner, along with the Maratha nobleman, Hindu Rao were among the cream of Delhi society. At the castle, built in the second decade of the 19th Century, an imitation of a large castellated house in Dr Ludlow’s village in England, a motley group of Firangi men and women collected to celebrate Christmas and the New Year.
It was the exclusive sahibs’ Delhi Club and much later admitted a few Indian businessmen, educationalists and other bigwigs. Also joining in the celebrations were Tommies (English soldiers) stationed in the Red Fort after the revolt of 1857 as a safeguard against another uprising in sympathy with Bahadur Shah Zafar who had been sent into exile, and the Mughals decimated. The Last Emperor’s samdhi , Mirza Ellahi Bux, whose daughter had married a son of Zafar and who used to stay at Chandi Mahal was however among the survivors.
Two sons of his, Mirza Suleiman Shah and Prince Soraya Jah, also enjoyed a high status in society but they were not among those who took part in the activities at Ludlow Castle. After the death of Fraser and Skinner and also Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the latter’s heir, Sir Theophilus Metcalfe was still around and visited the club sometimes by driving in his carriage from Metcalfe House (known to Delhiwallahs as “Matka Kothi”.) Would you believe it that Hindu Rao, brother-in-law of Maharaja Daulatrao Scindia of Gwalior, played Santa Claus and distributed gifts to the ladies who had attracted his attention, bohemian as he was?
New Year’s Eve at Ludlow Castle was a grand affair with a forenoon picnic at the Ridge, a lip-smacking lunch (of rabbit pie and vindaloo) and a sumptuous dinner which followed drinks and a ballroom dance at which many a couple tied the bond of love. Theodore Jones and Dorothy Smith were one such pair who swore eternal friendship. Douglas Hynes and Victoria Marian also decided to get hitched, but Norah Nicholson and James Brown had a misunderstanding as Norah felt that the tipsy James was ogling at another girl, Dolly who came and sipped from his glass, and then sang “Auld lang syne”, holding his hand. Sadly enough, they broke up the next morning, when New Year’s Day was only a few hours old, if old Mrs Violet Maguire’s yarns be true.
She used to live in a bungalow on Ludlow Castle Road and when one met her in the 1950s the Anglo-Indian matriarch was 86 years old and a great repository of the gossip of the days when Rudyard Kipling was writing for the Pioneer, along with Winston Churchill, (when the paper was published from Allahabad). But his stories were avidly read in Delhi, asserted Mrs Maguire.
She was a near-nonagenarian when Bombay House in Ludlow Castle Road was converted into residential quarters for teachers of the newly-opened St Xavier’s School. Quite a contrast to the New Year festivities at Ludlow Castle were the celebrations at Bombay House (more than 60 years later) where stayed the Beckwiths, the Halges, the Dawsons the lively young couple of Maxie and Ann and hockey wizard George Marthins, who scored the winning goal for India in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics
Old Mr Beckwith had been a police officer in Bihar but had become an invalid after retirement, being looked after by his wife who had passed some of her younger days in the Agra Fort, where the families of the British and Anglo-Indian members of the armed forces stayed in the pre-war years. The Gardners were the descendants of Lord Gardner after whom Gardner’s Horse was named. They belonged to Kasganj, in U.P., where the family had settled down on the vast estate of their illustrious ancestor. Alan Gardner was the head of the family in the 1960s and for the villagers and his relatives still very much the Lat Sahib in-charge of the haveli and Bibikhana of the first Lord Gardner, who had married a princess of Cambay.
Mr Dawson had been in the erstwhile Ceylonese Navy, and though a physical instructor then, could enliven an afternoon with tales of his encounters with smugglers in Palk Strait, Mr Halge was a big-built man with lantern jaws who sometimes related family yarns like the one about his grandfather, who once spent his entire salary wiping himself during a bout of dysentery on a train. Ironically they were all crisp notes which in the dark bathroom he mistook for the roll of tissue paper he was carrying in the other pocket. Eric Gardner recounted a tale about a headless ghost at the Kasganj Bibikhana.
The Hon. Gardner swore that the tale was true and dated back to 1867 when the first train steamed into Delhi with a piercing whistle on the midnight of New Year’s Eve. Few remember Ludlow Castle now whose site is occupied by a model school, while the old Delhi Club is beyond the ken of living memory.
Probably, the spectre still haunts the Bibikhana. Meanwhile for away from Bombay House Ann fights for life in distant Melbourne, with Maxie at her side, while the bedroom stereo plays the perennial ditty, “Can auld acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne”!
