The sixth Nizam of Hyderabad and the connection to Carrigans

Adjoining it is a small cemetery where parishioners have been buried since the eighteenth century and probably earlier. Old graveyards can be fascinating places, with enigmatic epitaphs on many of the headstones, something rarely seen in modern cemeteries.

For instance, in the cemetery in Carrigans, there is a small insignificant slate type headstone, with only the words, “Mary & Nancy & Lucy Devlin. Died Young. 1796.” How young were they? How young is ‘young’? Were they just children? What happened to them? Did they die of a disease? Did they die of famine? Who knows? The epitaph on Yeats’ grave could also aptly apply to this, or the thousands of other forgotten markers for forgotten people.

Cast a cold eye - on life, on Death, Horse man, pass by.

In a different corner of the little graveyard, in contrast to this simple, yet sad, little marker to three children, now unknown, stands an impressive headstone. Along with the names of those buried therein, there is an epitaph on one side. It reads,

They shall be mine saith the Lord on the

Day when I make up my Jewels

When I first read those words, many years ago, I was puzzled and at the same time, fascinated in a way. What do these words mean, I wondered?

Once upon a time, there was a man called Asaf Jah VI Mir Mahboob Ali Khan Siddiqi Bayafandi, or, for short, just ‘Mahboob Ali Khan’, sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, in India. (pronounced Niz-AAM).

The title ‘Nizam of Hyderabad’ was a bit like ‘King of Hyderabad, or ‘Emperor of Hyderabad’. Hyderabad is a city in central India and is the capital and largest city in the state of Telangana.

At the time of the Raj, or Britain’s rule over India, during its Empire days, Hyderabad was an important city for the British. The British Empire was not unique. It was not the first empire, nor will it be the last. Empires have existed since time began.

At that time, India was comprised of individual states, called Princely States, over five hundred of them, some small, some very large. These states were each ruled by one dynastic ruler, chosen by hereditary birth right.

The rulers of each state had different titles, depending on the individual state. But they were all emperors of their own fiefdom. Some had the title, Maharajah, some by other titles, like Raja (king), Sultan, Nizam, Nawab, Mughal, Emir, to name a few. But whatever the title, their rule was absolute and, as I have stated, their power was handed down from generation to generation.

The Nizam in this case was the sixth to have this title. His name, as I have stated above, was Asaf Jah VI Mir Mahboob Ali Khan Siddiqi Bayafandi, or just known as Mahboob Ali Khan, sixth Nizam of Hyderabad. He ruled from 1869 to 1911.

During his reign, the Nizam was the richest man in the world, bar none. Even the riches of the Empress herself, sitting on her throne in London, or passing the days among the Scottish heathers with her friend, John Brown, paled in comparison. His wealth was limitless, his palaces many, as were his wives and concubines.

Hyderabad had the richest diamond mines on the continent and the British had no intention of losing out on their cut. The Sixth Nizam’s main palace was in the capital, Hyderabad and, for example, his wardrobe alone was over 240 feet long.

He owned the largest diamond in the world, the Jacob Diamond and in fact, he once lost it and despite much searching, no-one found it – until one day, many years after the Nizam’s death, his son found it, stuck in the toe of one of his father’s many thousands of slippers.

He was so unaware of its true value, that he used it as a simple paper weight, until someone realised that this was more than a glass weight. (In 1995, the Indian Government bought the diamond, outright, from the last Nizam’s Trust for the sum of $13,000,000).

He kept chests full of diamonds and jewels and he had glass bottles everywhere, all stuffed with jewels, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, all sorts of precious stones. A bit like we, as youngsters, did with playing marbles.

He often went walkabout or riding one of his elephants through the streets and he would often throw handfuls of jewels to the local bystanders.

But these jewels didn’t give those who were lucky enough to grab a couple, any wealth.

They couldn’t simply walk into the local jewellers and bargain a price. The market was tightly controlled by the Nizam and eventually the scattered jewels would find their way back to the only buyer – the Nizam himself. The urchins who caught them might have got a little value, but not a lot.

The Nizam had thousands of jewels, all sizes and colours, hidden and stored everywhere. The Jewels of the Nizams of Hyderabad State are among the largest and most expensive collection of jewels in present-day India. While they are now owned by the State of India, when the Nizams ruled Hyderabad, they owned all the jewels personally.

As well as precious stones and other countless riches, the Nizam owned over two hundred cars, all Rolls Royce. He even bought his son, for his birthday, seven Rolls Royce, one for every day of the week.

Everything was going along nicely, but soon trouble reared its head and while it didn’t come in the usual way, that is, armed rebellion, it was as equally as dangerous to the interests of Britain – the Nizam’s books were beginning to look a tad unhealthy and the returns were getting thin.

Within his own borders, the Nizam wielded absolute power over the lives of his subjects, making his own laws, both civil and criminal, directing his own administration, levying his own taxes and customs, minting his own currency and issuing his own stamps.

However, the Nizam preferred to spend his money on women, horses, cars and gambling, in whatever order took his fancy on the day, rather than ‘investing’ it back into his own state (which included paying the British their cut of the cake), with the result that, unlike, for example, Mysore, which managed its finances with some efficiency, the British could see gaps in the Nizam’s finances, so they began taking a closer look at his books. Something had to be done and done quickly.

One of the Nizam’s problems was that he had, literally, thousands of hangers on and they were all profiting handsomely from the Nizam’s purse (for example, almost 40 alone were employed to do nothing more than dust the chandeliers, every day), but soon the British got a bit miffed at the Nizam spending his massive wealth on whatever he chose to spend it on, instead of bulking out the coffers of the Raj.

The state of Hyderabad was haemorrhaging Rupees by the bucket and this state of affairs couldn’t be allowed to continue.

But rather than a massive invasion of troops, the British overlords came up with a different plan. They sent in one George Walker to sort out the Nizam’s books. “George who ?”, I can almost hear you ask.

Well, our Georgie boy was no relation to the earlier George Walker, whose sixteen foot statue stood on the top of an eighty foot high column pillar on Derry’s walls for almost a hundred and fifty years, before he came crashing down.

No, while Derry’s George fought his battles with the sword, the George Walker I’m talking about, fought with nothing more than the pen and well, you know what they say about the pen being mightier than the sword !

To now reveal the connection with Donegal and Carrigans, we have to go back a few years, to County Galway and to Cobh, in County Cork, then known as Queenstown.

In 1882, two sisters, named Fanny and Ellen Coates, left their home in County Galway and made their way to Cobh. It was from here, they departed, hoping to make a new life for themselves in far away India. To do this, they had decided to join what was known as ‘The Fishing Fleet’.

Now the ‘Fishing Fleet’ had nothing to do with fish, it was a euphemism for husband searching.

The chances of a girl from an upper class background finding a suitable man in Ireland at that time were remote. The choices were few and far between, the average Irish man was generally poor and not particularly suitable for young girls who were daughters of English stock.

And to get a man of good English stock in Ireland, well, the only ones on offer wore uniforms and their prospects would not have been high.

They usually ended up dying for King and Country, if not in someplace like Tipperary, then in any of the far off battlefields, scattered around the globe, leaving nothing more than a medal or two, but very little else.

So Fanny and Ellen decided to head further afield and boarded the next ship which was heading for India. They knew that India was the place to find a better class of husband. And they knew exactly where to look – the Indian Civil Service, or ICS, for short.

The men of the ICS (those who were English, of course) were the best pickings a girl could get. They were generally well paid and had good promotion prospects. In fact, working in the ICS was regarded a ‘handy number’ and the job carried a substantial pension.

The two girls no sooner arrived in India, when fortune smiled on them, or more correctly, two stalwart members of the ICS smiled on them and soon the bell ringers were spitting on their hands and wedding bells were peeling.

Fanny Coates fell for a whizz kid accountant, called George Walker, who had a staff of twenty, and Ellen’s heart was taken by a judge, by the name of Archibald Christie.

Soon, George Walker and Fanny Coates got married and George got himself a nice promotion. He was asked to go to Hyderabad and go through the Nizam’s books and sort out the mess that was the Nizam’s finances.

So, off went George and Fanny to Hyderabad and sure enough, to cut a long story short, as they say, within two years, George had the Nizam’s books balanced and soon the money and wealth was flowing the right way again. But it was not all plain sailing during those years.

This was no mean feat to manage successfully, for not alone did George successfully balance the books and plug the leaks, but he managed to retain the Nizam’s friendship – not an easy double to pull off.

But it was not the Nizam that George or Fanny feared, it was the hundreds of hangers on, who were living off the Nizam’s purse strings and who, with a stroke of his pen, George soon saw the back of.

He got rid of thousands of them. These were the people whom George feared, any of which might have carried a katar up his sleeve and would have used it without compunction, so much that on many occasions, George and Fanny took turns in sleeping, while one slept, the other kept guard at the foot of the bed with a twelve bore shotgun.

But, as far as we know, neither George nor Fanny had to pull either barrel during their time. They also had a team of hand picked loyal and trustworthy servants to watch over them, day and night, with half a dozen even employed solely as food tasters in case someone decided to add a bit of dodgy curry sauce!

Happily, they came through this ordeal unscathed, neither became the victim of a sharp katar or an even sharper curry and George was rewarded with a knighthood. He was now Sir George Casson Walker K.C.S.I. Fanny became Lady Walker.

George and Fanny managed to inveigle themselves into Royal circles and when the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future King George V, the present Queen’s grandfather) visited India in 1906, Sir George and Lady Fanny were invited to the Royal dinner and introduced to the Prince and Princess.

Whether that brought a smile to the face of the Princess is unknown, as May was not famed for her pleasant demeanour. However, the Princess expressed her view, at that dinner party, that there was a need for a special school for purdah girls in Hyderabad.

At this time this idea was revolutionary and the lady who got the nod from Princess May to approach the Nizam for approval…. and more importantly, a bit of funding, was none other than Lady Fanny Walker.

The Nizam gave the nod plus a substantial grant and the Mahbubian Girls School came into being and still exists to this day. Fanny herself was decorated in 1910 for her charitable work, during the great flood of India in 1908. (Even the Nizam opened his palace to victims of the flood).

George Walker and his wife, Fanny, had a family of four, a boy named Geoffrey and three girls, Jennie, Constance Lillian and Dorothy. Jennie married Captain Robert McClintock, an Irish landlord, of British stock, whose family had a large estate in Donegal.

Captain Robert McClintock had been laid low by fever during a routine visit to nearby Secunderabad. At the hospital where he was being treated, Jennie Walker was working as a volunteer nurse. Love soon set in and they were married in 1908 in Hyderabad. They moved to Donegal in 1913 and there they had one son, William George McClintock.

Fanny’s sister, Ellen, married a judge named Archibald Christie. They had two boys, Archie and Campbell. Campbell married his cousin, Dorothy Walker, while his brother, Archie, married a young aspiring writer, by the name of Agatha Miller and on becoming his wife, she took his name and became Agatha Christie – yes, that Agatha Christie..

The Nizam himself died in 1911 and was succeeded by his son, Mir Osman Ali Khan Siddiqi, Asaf Jah VII . He reigned until the end of British rule in India, in 1947 and while all the other former princely states now divided into one country or another, (either India or Pakistan), the seventh Nizam thought he could paddle his own canoe and declared independence for Hyderabad.

His primary preference was to join the new country of India, but he was overwhelmingly surrounded by staff who were Muslim and followers of Jinnah and favoured an independent Pakistan.

So the Nizam thought independence from both was the best option, but the Indian government was having none of it.

The Indian government allowed him to carry on for a few months, before invading and laying siege for about a week in September, 1948, ending his plans and thankfully, on this occasion, comparatively little blood was spilled. However, to temper his sorrows, they did make him the Governor of Hyderabad. While his riches were considerably cut, he still managed ok. He died in 1967.

As regards the Nizam’s wealth, there was so much of it that even today, in 2020, hundreds of relations are challenging for a share of a fortune which lies in a bank vault in London. Estimates put it anything north of 100 million pounds.

Sir George retired to Hove in 1911 on an annual pension of approximately £1,200, a princely sum in those days. He died in 1925 and was buried in Hove. His wife, Lady Fanny then moved to Carrigans in Co. Donegal, to live with her daughter, Jennie McClintock and her husband, the now Lieutenant Colonel Robert McClintock and their son, William, on their estate.

Fanny died in 1935 and she was not buried with her husband in Hove, but interred, presumably for practical reasons, in the small Church of Ireland graveyard in the village of Carrigans. Her second daughter, Lillian Constance, lies with her.

It is Fanny Walker’s headstone, which I speak about at the start of this little story and the epitaph written thereon.

They shall be mine saith the Lord on the

Day when I make up my Jewels

As I have stated, this verse and this reference to jewels has often puzzled me.

While it comes from the book of Malachi, chapter 3, verse 17, why did she choose this particular verse? Was it simply plucked from the Bible, or was she, as I can’t help thinking, making a vague reference to the Nizam ......and perhaps having the last laugh in regard to some of the Nizam’s fortune of jewels?......We shall never know!

But it is somewhat sobering to think that after a long journey throughout the world, this lady, who dined with the Prince and Princess of Wales and who had the friendship and trust of the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad and even spent many nights in his palace, with shotgun at the ready, finally rests in this small graveyard in the village of Carrigans.

Perhaps to paraphrase Rupert Brooke and his poem, “The Soldier”, one could say that she now lies in a corner of a foreign field that is forever India. Or perhaps, being originally from Galway, she finally came home to lie in peace, in Ireland.

P.S. Unfortunately, there is a sad end to our story. Fanny’s daughter, Jennie, together with her son William and William’s English fiancé, all died in a tragic and mysterious shooting incident one autumn afternoon in 1938 at their home in Carrigans.

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