Dad’s little black book
Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Power. I started with my father’s work on hydro-electric power projects, but realized another power.
I was trying to piece together details of my father’s life and work when I found myself facing a huge hole. We knew that he had spent two years in India in the 1930s but almost nothing about why he was there. But he had left a record, of sorts. He was a keen photographer, who carefully organized his photographs in albums, and kept an index, in a black leather notebook, with the date, the location and who was in each one of several thousand photographs. After he died, we found two of his albums but the earliest one has been lost. But the more than 600 photos he took during his journeys to and from, and his travels within, India are all documented and from the descriptions in the notebook I was able to re-construct the details of his work there.
Dad left England at the end of 1931, to work for Callender’s Cables and Construction Company which was building hydro-electric dams in the Punjab. The voyage to India took him through the Suez Canal to Bombay, then he travelled on to Lahore, where the Callender offices were located. Lahore (at that time still part of India), was to be his base, though his work involved water engineering projects throughout the Punjab.
Photos of the Himalayas, Indian temples, forts, cities, and countryside, were interspersed with others of transmission lines and irrigation canals. There were hill men and women, views from rest houses and gymkhana club gardens. And there were ‘pole structures’, sinking caissons and overhead switchgear. There were photos of acquaintances and friends, and their dogs, and of trips to the Khyber Pass and to the Agra and the Taj Mahal. And Christmas was celebrated well by the expatriate community in Lahore in 1933.
There is a Persian wheel in Shalomar, and there are water buffaloes in Jalloo. Amritsar, Wagaa, Dharwal, Kotla, Beas, Baijnath and Dharmsala are just a few of the places he visited. There is a photo of Zam Zammah annotated “ref.Kim” – it is a large cannon which stands in front of the Lahore Museum, and is also known as Kim’s Gun. Built before 1791 for the Persian Emperor, Duri Durran, it has a long and venerable history of being stolen by one group after another. Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim opens with the boy straddling the barrel of the gun. Dad would read Kipling stories to us as kids and would boast of having once had tea with Kipling.
“HE sat, in defiance of municipal orders, on the gun Zam-Zammah…Who hold Zam-Zammah… hold the Punjab.” Rudyard Kipling, Kim
But why was Douglas there? The transmission lines and irrigation canals, the caissons and switchgears were all part of a hydro-electricity project in the Indus Valley. Improvements in turbine design ushered in a boom in mega-dam building in the 1930s. On January 30 1933 Douglas was present, according to the little black book, at the signing of a contract involving hydroelectric projects on the Uhl River. The Uhl is a tributary of the Beas, one of the major rivers under the Indus basin. British Engineer Colonel B.C. Batty planned to construct 5 hydroelectric power stations by utilizing the water of Uhl river. The plan was to use the water for 5 power projects, in three stages. Stage 1 saw the building of the Shanan Power House. But on the death of Mr. Batty, the project remained incomplete. What part of this particular project Douglas was involved in is only conjecture, but it seems likely that this was the reason he was in India.
So, thanks to his little black book (and the internet) I can explore the places he went, the company he worked for, the projects he was engaged in. Thanks Dad, a powerful contribution to my discoveries.
Barot is the inlet point of the tunnel that diverts river water of Uhl river to Shanan Power House in Jogindernagar. The town has a diversion dam that was commissioned in 1932. (Wikipedia). Did my father work on its construction?