With the sleeper train leaving Andun station in Kolkata at 9 pm, we had a day to spend and decided to go to Saint John’s Church which an idiot taxi driver had never heard of the previous day. Its the third oldest Christian church in Kolkatta and is huge; its where most of the leading luminaries in the British East India Company were buried when they snuffed it mostly-in their 30-40’s apart from Frances Johnson (nee Crook) who died at the grand old age of 87 having had five husbands and lots of children in Calcutta of all places. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned there. I don’t expect she got the shits or slept on the street. She was born in Calcutta unlike members of the “Fishing Fleet”; desperate debutantes who were so hideously ugly that they were reduced to undertaking the hazardous journey to India to find a bloke who was so hideously ugly that he would accept one of them. I feel sorry for the women who had to come home without landing a catch. Such is the stuff that empires are made of.
There is also an impressive memorial to the dead in the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756 after the Siege of Bengal; Zephanie Holwell, who was a survivor, says that 146 British soldiers were locked up of whom 123 died. Their names are inscribed on the stone pillar. William Dalrymple says that 7 generations of Dalrymple lived in Calcutta and three are buried at Saint Johns. The most famous ancestor was William Pattle who was renowned as “the greatest liar in India”. So much so that the Devil said he would never leave India. Just to prove him wrong, Pattle demanded that his remains be sent back to England preserved in rum in a casket. The story goes that, while still on the River Hooghly, Pattle suddenly sat up, knocking the top off the casket and giving his wife a heart attack from which she died. So two caskets full of rum were shipped down the Hooghly, the sailors smelt the rum, drilled holes into the caskets, drank the rum, got rat-arsed and crashed the boat on a sandbank whence it exploded and got burned to a cinder. So the Devil got it right. We also saw a large oil painting of the Last Supper by Johann Zoffany. The disciples have the faces of prominent officials of the British East India Company. James Paul, the English Resident at the Royal Court of Oudh who modelled for the portrait of Judas, committed suicide a few years later, much like the Biblical traitor. We also saw the mausoleum of Job Charnock, the supposed founder of the city. It is a massive octagonal structure with a serrated parapet and a dome on top, erected, surprisingly, by his son-in-law Sir Charles Eyre in the 1690s.
Black Hole of Calcutta monument
Black Hole monument
Gravestone with a skull and crossbones
Job Charnock’s grave
Job Charnock’s mausoleum
These blokes were killed overthrowing the Nawab of Oudh
First stone of St Johns Church
The Last Supper
Ancient water pump in a Kolkata street with huge pigeon