Partition by Barney White-Spunner

Author:Barney White-Spunner [White-Spunner, Barney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gnv64
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8. AUGUST

THE NOBLEST ACT OF THE BRITISH NATION?

‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’

(JAWAHARLAL NEHRU)

‘Our people have gone mad’

(LIAQUAT ALI)

The monsoon should have arrived by the end of July, that deluge of rain ‘when nature is washed green and breathes again’ and when ‘for a few days, cool air and the smell of damp earth are blessings beyond price’, but it didn’t. The terrible, humid, cloying, all-enveloping heat just continued as if it would never end.1

There was nowhere to escape it. One of those it affected most was Cyril Radcliffe, a man who had never been east of Gibraltar, and who was now ensconced in a bungalow on the viceroy’s estate. He had two weeks to finalise drawing the partition lines on the maps of Bengal and the Punjab. Christopher Beaumont had been appointed as his secretary and minder. He had applied for a position in Palestine and thought that he had left India for good when he was asked to take the job on. He arranged to meet Radcliffe in the Air Terminal beside London’s Victoria Station. He was worried as to how he would recognise him. The BOAC lady suggested that he should wear a badge with his name on it but Beaumont, an old-fashioned man, was appalled at the vulgarity of the idea as he was by her subsequent suggestion that he should make an announcement ‘over a thing called a Tannoy’. In the end he simply approached the most intelligent-looking man in the room.2 At first he found Radcliffe ‘a rather arrogant man, very self important, almost pompous, unemotional. I never heard him laugh very much’.3 ‘Meeting him’, thought Mountbatten’s press secretary, Alan Campbell-Johnson, ‘was a cold experience’.

However, they agreed that he had both a formidable mind and that he was totally incorruptible. Beaumont later ‘formed an affection for him’ although he never knew whether this was reciprocated. When they arrived in Delhi they spent two nights staying with the Mountbattens in Viceroy’s House. ‘There were just four of us at meals. Mountbatten and Radcliffe did not get on well. They could not have been more different.’ Mountbatten ‘had few literary tastes’. Radcliffe, a Fellow of All Souls, ‘was of outstanding intelligence and very quietly civilised. Lady Mountbatten, to her credit, adroitly kept the conversations on an even keel.’ They then moved into their house on the Viceregal estate. There was no air conditioning. The first task Beaumont was given was to scour the bazaars for wine, preferably white; he managed to find some cases of Alsatian which seemed to cheer Radcliffe up as he started work.4 Radcliffe and Beaumont had an assistant secretary, Rao Sahib V. D. Ayer, a Hindu in the ICS.

Beaumont found the two panels of judges assigned to sit on the respective Boundary Commissions were ‘not much help as they always divided along communal lines’. There had been open sessions in court but again the arguments presented went almost entirely based on whether the person advancing them was Hindu or Muslim.

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