Calcutta in the Cotswolds 

David Gilmour

‘Certain families,’ Kipling wrote in his story ‘The Tomb of His Ancestors’, ‘serve India generation after generation as dolphins follow in line across the open sea.’ It was common indeed for three generations of the same family to spend their careers in India; often it was four, sometimes five, occasionally six. A number of Britons (or Anglo-Indians as they were called) could boast that both sides of their family had been in India for more than a hundred years. For the Scottish Wedderburns, the Indian Civil Service had become ‘a sort of hereditary calling’ in the 19th century, replacing the hereditary calling of the previous century, which had been to fight for the Jacobites and be executed for treason. Not that the ICS was a much safer choice: William Wedderburn joined it in 1860 shortly after his brother and sister-in-law and their child had been killed in the Mutiny. Later in his career he responded to another Scottish ‘calling’, joining the band of radical civil servants who supported Indian nationalism and serving two terms after retirement as President of the Indian National Congress.

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