Clive Branson (1) (1907–1944)

In summary, heart-breaking correspondence, the well-read and gifted author describing the beauty of India contrasting with the ways the British government were treating the Indians in a political cauldron, fighting the Japanese and fascism, fighting poverty and famine, and hatred of the British who were also their allies. Sadly the correspondence ends suddenly. The author was killed in action in Burma.

In more detail, my Dad was in the army in the Signals and in 1936 was posted to India and did not return to the UK until 1946. His mother died in 1940 and, according to my Dad, the last time he saw her, she was waving to him on Havant Station in 1936 as the train departed. She died in 1940 and he in 2005. He talked very little about the War or India. He was never at the front or in action and played a lot of sport. That’s about all he said. Once I recalled a visit to our house of some of his army mates in the 1960s, possibly around 1963 or 1964. I was just ten or eleven years old. I remember seeing these men and their wives sitting on chairs in our small sitting room drinking tea and eating cake and biscuits quite nervously.It was a bit like the Tony Hancock sketch with Sid James, the anti-climax of a reunion that takes place in a totally different environment. The stress and strain of the war situation had been replaced by getting on with their ordinary jobs and lives, bringing up their families and not much fun apart from the odd game of snooker on a Friday evening and going steady with the ale because of gippy tummies. They didn’t stay long and I don’t think they ever met up again. All that remains are black and white photos and nicknames I have forgotten, apart from my Dad’s who was called Hollowlegs, young, slim and laughing men up to antics such as fancy dress and seeming to be on holiday and not defending the peace. I picked up British Soldier in India in a second-hand bookshop, hoping to find out more about the environment in which the British army was operating in India in the Second World War. Clive Branson, whose correspondence sadly ended at his death in action in Burma in 1944, was from a more privileged background than my Dad’s. Branson went to a preparatory school and was a talented artist who became a student at the Slade School of Art. He exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. He was well read and interested in politics, joining the Communist Party in 1932. He volunteered for service in the Spanish war and ended up in a Franco concentration camp. My Dad, born in 1914, was the son of a grocer who died in 1919 when he was only 4 years old. For a short time he attended Portsmouth Grammar School, possibly 1928-30, at which point his widowed mother and family could no longer afford the fees. He could draw and his sister, Margaret, could paint but they were not of the calibre to become students at prestigious art colleges. From some of the words exchanged between us in a nursing home in Oxfordshire as his dementia worsened, I sensed that my Dad struggled at the Technical College in Portsmouth that he attended after school and his mother, in his words, ’helped him over many hillocks’, one of which is likely to have been a serious stutter that he had in his youth. Branson expresses his despair at the treatment the British Rule meted out to the Indians. This attitude was reflected in the behaviour of many soldiers who were posted to India. Inevitably, as a result, the Indians hated the British and did not consider the soldiers there to be their allies fighting against the Japanese and fascism. Throughout his letters Branson returns to the contradictions India presented. There was the beauty of the landscape and the its bright colours. With its rich earth there was the opportunity of great wealth. On the other hand there was poverty and famine, the hatred of the British and the complexity of the political cauldron in which Indians were fighting for their own future and saw one route as ‘looking towards Japan for help’ (page 17). From the few words my Dad said about his time in India I sensed that he was positive about the beauty of the landscape and its bright colours but that he was in the camp of those who had little time for the Indians. He may have shared Branson’s observations soon on arrival in India:

‘This country is giving me a new colour sense. The other evening the sun was just setting making the whole sky a brilliant hard yellow. A labourer came past, his skin a brown black; round his head the folds of gleaming white cloth. The road, the dry earth, a pale mauve with strips of lemon-green sugar patches. No shadows - the light in the shaded parts being too rich in colour to look different’ (page 11).

He may also have been aware of the hatred the Indians had for the British described in Branson’s letter of September 26th 1942:

‘The British are loathed, and only an Indian National Government will make this India’s war. Indians just don’t believe one word of our claims to be fighting for freedom, etc. This is the truth of the set-up out here, and no other explanation is correct’ page 32.

Branson is appalled by the behaviour of the soldiers towards the Indians. He describes them as ‘bloody idiots in the regular army who want to indulge in abuse of the Indians. They treat the Indians in a way which not only makes one tremble for the future but which makes one ashamed of being one of them...They never write home, they try to suppress all feelings about blighty, they vent their own misfortunes on any hapless and helpless Indian...’ (pages 12-13).

My Dad did write home but the letters are lost apart from one that covered his outward journey. There is no doubt, however, that implicit in him there was a trace of racism that almost certainly will have derived from his decade in India, what he saw and experienced, poverty, famine and no encouragement to get to know and understand India and the Indians.

'British soldier in India' illuminated my understanding of India in the Second World War, the way of life of those posted there, the negative attitude of the British government towards the country and its inhabitants, the contrasts of poverty, famine and the beauty of the surroundings, the soldiers thousands of miles from home and the uncertainty and fear of the outcome of the war against the Japanese.… (altro)