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 Posted: Mon 20 Jul 2009 04:41 Post subject: Diana Quick: How I discovered my mixed-race heritage |
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/diana-quick-how-i-discovered-my-mixedrace-heritage-1686778.html
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| Quote: | May 18, 2009
Diana Quick: How I discovered my mixed-race heritage
Renowned as one of the most English of actresses, Diana Quick always suspected there was some mystery about her racial background. But it was not until the death of her father that she started unravelling the truth.
I am probably thought of as being quintessentially "English" ever since playing Julia in Brideshead Revisited 28 years ago. In fact, starting with Rosa the gypsy in a school musical, I have often played exotic parts: Indian princesses, Russian revolutionists, Algerian outcasts, Creoles, Cubans, Jewish refugees, and Greeks – from peasants (in Christ Recrucified) to divas (as Callas in Martin Sherman's Aristo last year). In fact, if I had to define the common denominator in the parts I have played, it would be less to do with race (or class) and more to do with a character's denial as to what they really are.
This became clear to me some years ago when I was commissioned by Virago to write a book. Wary of writing about acting, which seems to me to exist only in the doing of it, and cagey about writing a warts-and-all memoir, since I cling to the old-fashioned idea that there must be some boundary between private life and public career, I decided to write about how as an actress I have used what is in my family cupboard to flesh out some of the characters I have been hired to play.
As a child I would ask my mother if we somewhere had foreign blood, and she would always shrug off the question, though she, like me, was dark-complexioned and my father had been raised in India until the age of 17. Why did I have an intuition that this was not the end of the story? Perhaps because I had always remembered the stern instruction of my paternal grandfather to me and my sister as small girls, that we were to "always obey our parents and only marry pure-blooded Englishmen".
This became a haunting memory for me, and when, some years later, my father suddenly died I was astonished to find that we were burying him with full Roman Catholic rites. I had no idea of his faith, and started to wonder what other secrets there might be about the man whom I felt very close to, but clearly didn't know very well at all. I started to ask questions, but all I could learn was that my father had come alone to England in the 1930s to study, had met my mother and been enchanted by her and her family and that there had been some kind of row with his folks back in India which led to him being cut off in the middle of his studies. He was supported by her family through the rest of his training and never returned to India, nor made peace with his family. For the time being, that had to do: my mother would not be drawn, saying she only wanted to remember the happy times.
With the commission to write I needed to know more, and pumped anybody I could find who had known the family then. There weren't many, and they were all curiously reticent, but I learned enough to begin to track the Quick family, from my grandfather who had lived all his life as a doctor and dentist on the North-West Frontier until his retirement to England in the 1950s, to his father who had gone out as a bombardier under a false name in the early 1870s and decided to stay on, and from there to his mother Margaret's family, the Johnstones, who were old India hands. I used the India Office, a part of the British Library that holds all the official records of Colonial India so carefully assembled under that elaborate bureaucracy.
Some six years on, I had slowly assembled a family tree and tracked down all sorts of relatives of whose existence I had not been aware. I unearthed family photographs and learned a great deal about the social history of life in India, not easy as this family was a modest one: not pukka sahibs who ran the empire, but rather the foot soldiers and middlemen doing the donkey work.
They were really below the radar of historical accounts, which tended to deal with the memoirs of officers or senior civil servants or politicians. I had no family papers to go on, and the records were patchy, but I knew by now that anyone who had been born and raised in India was looked down on by those who came out from Britain to run the empire.
I tracked the service record of Margaret Johnstone's father James and her grandfather Jacob. Both were drum majors in the native infantry of the East India Company. James was dead by the time his 14-year-old daughter married, but I could not find out how he had died, and some months passed as I followed up leads and records that got me nowhere. It became clear to me that Margaret's father and grandfather had to be of mixed race. Why? Because they were drummers in the native infantry. By the late 18th century, this was one of the few posts left open to a soldier of mixed parentage.
It had been different earlier, for the East India Company had discouraged the presence of unattached European females. As an anonymous saying had it, "necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian", and as the British colonies expanded during the 17th and 18th centuries, so too did the number of mixed-race offspring, until there were more children of mixed parentage than there were whites. They had been acknowledged, educated, and often given significant authority in the Company and its army, but by the 1790s – just as Jacob Johnstone was seeking a career – that colour-blindness gave way to a new racism.
The Johnstone brothers, who had come out from Scotland to Calcutta to make their fortunes had each kept a zenana or harem, but these free and easy ways were no longer acceptable. White women were starting to come out now and a growing Evangelicalism, which regarded Hindus and Muslims as benighted pagans, further diminished the status of the native peoples. Away in the West Indies, the slave revolt in Haiti tried to enlist the support of the large mixed-race community there, who had been treated by the French much as the Eurasians had by the British. They had been acknowledged, sent to Europe to be educated and returned to positions of authority in the colony.
This attempt at alliance backfired with disastrous consequences. The mestizes, or mixed races, changed sides, claiming to be black when they thought the slave army would be victorious, then supporting the whites when the tide turned in their favour. The East India Company's council was appaled, seeing a premonition of what could happen in their own colony. They issued new standing orders for India, banning anyone of mixed race from employment in the "civil, military or marine services of the company": the only opportunities were as a fifer or drummer or farrier – all positions where you would be unlikely to wield a weapon.
It took a while for my hunch about mixed racial origins for the Johnstone ancestors to be confirmed. It came through that other great tool of family research – the internet. Basil, another descendant of Margaret's, had been tracking the family from New Zealand. Basil found me because he knew that the Quicks had moved to England after independence and were still a medical family, so he had googled any Dr Quicks and found my brother, who passed him on to me.
By now I knew a lot about the background to the family; I knew that colonial life was deeply patriotic, with a great fondness for home, even though people like my grandparents and great grandmother had never even been there. I knew how hierarchical the social structure was so that the order of precedence governed the status of everything, even down to which servant could serve which vegetable. I knew that effectively India was run by the British as a form of apartheid to which everyone more or less consented, with the whites at the top, the natives at the bottom and the mixed race caught between – aspiring to white values, calling the natives "niggers", being more English than the English and wanting, if possible, to pass as white.
So when, delicately, I broached the question of Margaret's probable mixed parentage, I was delighted when Basil was able to confirm that the Johnstones had kept zenanas, and that Jacob, her grandfather, had married Lakshmi, "a native" in Calcutta. He warned me too that even now some of the family did not like talk of mixed blood in their ancestry. Old prejudices die hard. Suddenly I understood my grandfather's preoccupation with "pure blood"; if you have spent a lifetime dealing with the consequences of racial prejudice, then of course you would wish to spare your children.
The story goes on: his quarrel with my father was because he had been told that my mother's father was "of a Jewish disposition" or if not Jewish, then Romany. Later he quarrelled with his daughter Esmerelda because the person she chose to marry, who had the English name of Hughes, was German and had Burmese blood in his mother's line. Poor grandfather: his attempts to protect his children from the consequences of their mixed ancestry led to their estrangement from him.
And where does that leave me? I feel placed, I suppose, in a context – those premonitions or fantasies of "otherness" I had as a child vindicated. I am able to celebrate my mixed heritage and looking forward to exploring it more in future parts. Oh, and with a delicious new field to explore – how does one play a "Jewish disposition"? And is it time to play another Romany? Rosa the gypsy girl was nearly 50 years ago ...
Diana Quick's memoir, A Tug on the Thread: From the British Raj to the British Stage is published by Virago |
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