Recollections of a Busy Life: Being the Reminiscences of a Liverpool Merchant 1840-1910Forwood, William Bower, Sir
History
Recollections of a Busy Life: Being the Reminiscences of a Liverpool Merchant 1840-1910
Forwood, William Bower, Sir
Forwood, William Bower, Sir, 1840-1928; Merchants -- England -- Liverpool -- Biography
In the summer of 1906, when motoring through Shropshire, I turned aside
to visit the little village church of Morton Saye, of which my
great-grandfather, Samuel Peploe, was vicar in 1770. I had not visited
the church for nearly fifty years. Then it was a very quaint,
old-fashioned place, with black oak pews and a black oak minstrel
gallery at one end close to the pulpit. This was the singing gallery,
the choir of three voices being led by a violin and cornet.
I found all had been changed. The church had been restored; the old
features had disappeared; but fortunately the restoration had been
carried out in good taste. I spoke to the vicar, who had followed us in,
and who was evidently proud of his little church; he showed me the brass
plate he had taken off the coffin of my grandfather, and had placed as a
memorial on the walls of the church. I knew the great Lord Clive had
been buried in the church, and asked to see his grave. The vicar pointed
to a flag-stone under some pews. There was no inscription upon it, and
he said that the only record they had that the great soldier was buried
in the church was the small brass plate above the vestry door, and he
added:--"Strange to say, there is no memorial to the man who made India,
either in England or India, except in Shrewsbury, his native town. I
suppose," he added, "it was because he committed suicide." On his return
home from India Lord Clive was furiously attacked by political enemies,
and the man who had shown on so many occasions such conspicuous courage
on the field of battle quailed and fell, struck down by the venom of his
calumniators.
When I was in India during the year following I enquired everywhere for
a memorial to Lord Clive, but, although India bristles with statues to
its governor-generals and eminent soldiers, there is in India to-day no
record of Lord Clive. I was so much impressed with this that I wrote the
following letter to _The Times_:--
Grand Hotel, Calcutta, Feb. 8th, 1907.
LORD CLIVE.
To the Editor of _The Times_.
Sir,--India has many monuments erected in honour of successful and
popular viceroys and others who have served her well, but I have
been unable to discover any monument to Lord Clive, to whom more
than any human being we owe our great empire of India. Westminster
Abbey contains no record of the great soldier-statesman.
In the by-ways of Shropshire, in the quaint little church of
Morton-Saye, the village swain sits Sunday after Sunday over the
grave of Lord Clive. No inscription marks it, not even his name; a
small brass plate hid away over the vestry door and scarcely
legible is the only record that the remains of Robert Clive rest
within its walls.
Truly Lord Clive made India, but in the making of it he aroused
jealousies and political enmities which, acting upon a too
sensitive nature, brought him to a premature death. But should he
be forgotten?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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