LIEUT.-COLONEL W. H. WILSON
1888-1893
Lieut-Colonel W. H. Wilson, who belonged to the Bombay District Police,
succeeded Sir Frank Souter on July 4th, 1888. He had already acted once
as Commissioner from October 1885 to May 1886, during his predecessor’s
absence on furlough. During the period which intervened between Sir F.
Souter’s departure on April 30th and Colonel Wilson’s appointment in
July, the duties of the Commissioner devolved upon Mr. H. G. Gell, the
Deputy Commissioner. Colonel Wilson held the appointment for five years,
during which he was twice absent on leave, once from May to December,
1889, when Colonel Wise was appointed _locum tenens_, and again for three
months in 1890, when his place was filled by Major Humfrey.
Throughout his term of office Colonel Wilson, like his predecessor,
was hampered by lack of men. The force at the date of his assumption
of control numbered 1621 and cost annually Rs. 505,135. By 1892 there
had been a trivial increase to 1634, while the annual cost had risen
to Rs. 513,896. This lack of men was undoubtedly responsible for a
decline in the prevention and detection of crime, as for example in
1888, when many cases of house-breaking were undetected, and in 1891,
when a serious increase of crime against property was recorded in
Mahim and other outlying areas. It also resulted in the force being so
seriously overworked that the percentage of men admitted to hospital
showed a constant tendency to increase. In his report of 1892 Colonel
Wilson informed Government that the burden of duty sustained by the rank
and file had become almost intolerable, that the men frequently became
prematurely aged from overwork, and that many of the superior officers
were ill from exposure and lack of rest. The Bombay Government endorsed
the Commissioner’s complaints and admitted the urgent need of increasing
the Force.[102] A reorganization of the Force, involving a considerable
addition to its numbers, had in fact been under consideration for several
years; but owing partly to financial stringency and partly to the delay
inseparable from all official transactions, the much-needed relief was
not granted until August, 1893,[103] by which date Colonel Wilson had
left India and Mr. Vincent had taken his place. The former thus had
little or no chance of securing any improvement in the criminal work of
the divisional police, and on more than one occasion he found his force
singularly inadequate to cope with special and emergent duties.
Like Sir Frank Souter, he also found the lack of police-stations and
buildings a serious obstacle to efficient administration. Within a few
months of assuming office he reported that the building at Byculla, in
which he worked, was very inconvenient and too far distant from the
business quarters of the City, and he urged the early construction of the
proposed Head Police Office on Hornby road. He reiterated his demands in
1890, 1891, and 1892, stating that no real improvement could be effected
until that office and additional quarters for the men were constructed.
As mentioned in the preceding chapter, accommodation was provided for
two European police officers in the Esplanade Police Court, which was
occupied for the first time in 1889; while in the last year of his tenure
of office, the divisional police secured some extra accommodation by the
full use of the old Maharbaudi building, which had proved inconvenient
to the public and was therefore vacated in 1893 by the Second Presidency
Magistrate in favour of a Government building in Nesbit Lane,
Mazagon.[104] In the latter building also accommodation was provided for
two European police officers.
The capabilities of the detective police were tested by several serious
crimes. The first, known as the Dadar Triple Murder, occurred in 1888
and aroused considerable public interest. Two Parsi women and a little
boy, residing in Lady Jamshedji road, were brutally murdered by a Hindu
servant, who was in due course traced, tried and executed. In 1890 the
murder of a Hindu youth at Clerk Road was successfully detected, and this
was followed in 1891 by the Khambekar Street poisoning case, in which a
respectable and wealthy family of Memons were killed by a dissolute son
of the house. The police investigation, which ended in the trial and
conviction of the murderer, was greatly obstructed by the collateral
relatives of the family, who made every effort to render the enquiry
abortive and were actively assisted by the whole Memon community.
These crimes, however, were cast into the shade by the famous Rajabai
Tower case, which caused great public agitation. On April 25th, 1891, two
Parsi girls, Pherozebai and Bacchubai, aged respectively 16 and 20 years,
were found lying at the foot of the Rajabai Clock Tower, in circumstances
and under conditions which indicated that they had been thrown from
above. When discovered, one of the girls was dead, and the other so
seriously injured that she expired within a few minutes. Suspicion fell
upon a Parsi named Manekji and certain other persons: but the latter were
released shortly after arrest, as there was no evidence that they were
in any way concerned in the death of the two girls. The Coroner’s jury,
after nineteen sittings, gave a verdict that Bacchubai had thrown herself
from the tower in consequence of an attempted outrage upon her by some
person or persons unknown, and that Manekji was privy to the attempted
outrage; and further that Pherozebai had been thrown from the tower by
Manekji, in order to prevent her giving information of the attempt to
outrage herself and her friend. Manekji was tried by the High Court on a
charge of murder and was acquitted. Various rumours were afloat as to the
identity of the chief actors in the crime, among those suspected being a
young Muhammadan belonging to a leading Bombay family. No further clue
was ever obtained, and to this day the true facts are shrouded in mystery.
The police dealt successfully with an important case of forgery, in
which counterfeit stamps of the value of one rupee were very cleverly
forged by a man who had previously served in the Trigonometrical Survey
Department of the Government of India and was afterwards proved to
have belonged to a gang of expert forgers in Poona. The collapse of
a newly-built house prompted Superintendent Brewin to make a lengthy
and careful inquiry into all the details of construction, which ended
successfully in the prosecution and punishment of the two jerry-builders
who erected it. House-collapses are not unknown in Bombay, particularly
during the monsoon, when the weight of the wet tiles causes the posts
of wooden-frame dwellings to give way; but so far as is known, the case
quoted is the only instance on record of a builder being prosecuted and
punished under the criminal law for causing loss of life by careless or
defective construction. The Sirdar Abdul Ali was equally successful in
unravelling an important case of illicit traffic in arms and ammunition
carried on by a gang of Pathans with certain transfrontier outlaws—a
matter in which the Government of India at that date (1888) took
considerable interest.
The offence of gambling in various forms occupied the attention of
the police to a greater degree than before, and the prevalence of
rain-gambling led to a test prosecution in the magisterial courts. This
form of wagering used to take place during the monsoon at Paidhoni,
where a house would be rented at a high price for the four months of the
rains by a group of Indian capitalists. There were two forms of _Barsat
ka satta_ or rain-gambling, known familiarly as _Calcutta mori_ and
_Lakdi satta_. In the former case wagers were laid as to whether the rain
would percolate in a fixed time through a specially prepared box filled
with sand, the bankers settling the rates or odds by the appearance and
direction of the clouds. In the latter case, winnings or losses depended
on whether the rainfall during a fixed period of time was sufficient to
fill the gutter of a roof and overflow. The gambling took place usually
between 6 a.m. and 12 noon, and again between 6 p.m. and midnight, the
rates varying according to the appearance of the sky and the time left
before the period open for the booking of bets expired. The practice,
which was very popular, was responsible for so much loss that in 1888 two
of the principal promoters of rain-gambling were prosecuted by the order
of Government. The Chief Presidency Magistrate, Mr. Cooper, who tried the
case, decided that rain-gambling was not an offence under the Gambling
Act, as then existing, and his decision was upheld on appeal by the High
Court. Consequently Colonel Wilson applied for the necessary amendment
of the Bombay Gambling Act, and this was in due course effected by the
Legislature. Since that date rain-gambling has been unknown in Bombay.
In 1890 and 1891 the police made continual raids on gambling-houses,
and in 1893 were obliged to adopt special measures against a form of
bagatelle, known as _Eki beki_, which had a wide vogue in the City. The
Public Prosecutor himself visited one of the more notorious resorts
in order to acquaint himself thoroughly with the system, which in
consequence of continuous action by the police was for the time being
practically stamped out of existence. Bombay, however, has always been
addicted to gambling, whether it be in the form of the well-known
_teji-mundi_ contracts, the _ank satta_ or opium-gambling, or the
ordinary gambling with dice and cards: and notwithstanding that the
police at intervals pay special attention to the vice and secure some
improvement, the evil reappears and rapidly increases, directly vigilance
is relaxed. The promoters of gambling are adepts in the art of misleading
the authorities: they rarely use the same room on two successive
occasions; they have elaborated a vocabulary of warning-calls; and they
employ spies and watchmen to keep them posted in all the movements of the
police. Some of the latter have probably at times accepted hush-money and
presents to turn a blind eye on the gamblers’ movements: for otherwise
it is difficult to understand why men, who are widely known to have been
organizing gambling reunions for years, should have successfully evaded
the law and in some cases have accumulated a considerable fortune in the
process.
Two matters of a novel character engaged the attention of the divisional
police during Colonel Wilson’s _régime_. The first was a series of
balloon ascents, which drew immense crowds of spectators. The earliest
ascents were performed in the opening months of 1889 from the grounds of
old Government House, Parel, by a Mr. Spencer, who successfully descended
with a parachute. He was followed in 1891 by Mr. and Mrs. Van Tassell,
who, except on one occasion when the lady’s parachute did not open
immediately, carried out their performances without a hitch. This form
of public amusement, however, came to a sudden and unhappy conclusion on
December 10th, 1891, when Lieutenant Mansfield, R. N., essayed an ascent.
When he had reached a height of about 1000 feet, the balloon suddenly
burst, and he fell headlong to earth and was killed in full view of a
large crowd of spectators. Since that date and up to the outbreak of the
War in 1914, the only aerial spectacle offered to the Bombay public was
a much-advertised aeroplane flight from the Oval. This venture was a
fiasco. The aeroplane would only rise a few feet from the ground, and at
that elevation collided violently with the iron railing of the B. B. and
C. I. railway and was wrecked.
The second event, which evoked much comment, was a strike by the
_employés_ of eleven cotton-spinning mills as a protest against a
reduction in wages. So far as can be gathered from official records, this
was the first strike of any magnitude that occurred in the industrial
area, and seems to have been the earliest effort of the labour-population
to test their powers of combination. The police had to be concentrated
in the affected area, in order to guard mill-property and quell possible
disorder: but the mill-workers at this date were quite unorganized and no
disturbance occurred. The action of these mill-hands, however, carried
the germ of the disorders which have since caused periodical damage to
the industry and have interfered frequently with the normal duties of the
police force.
It is convenient at this point to refer to the problem of European
prostitution, which has repeatedly formed the subject of comment in more
recent years. Before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the foreign
prostitute from eastern Europe was practically unknown in Bombay, and
such immorality as existed was confined to women of Eurasian or Indian
parentage. Once, however, the large European shipping-companies had
established regular steamer-communication with India, and Port Said had
become a port of call and an asylum for the riff-raff of Europe, the Jew
procurer and “white-slave” trafficker gradually included India within the
orbit of a trade, which was characterized by a fairly regular demand and
by large and easily earned profits. The Foreigners Act III of 1864, under
the provisions of which the Bombay Police arrange for the deportation
of foreign pimps, as well as of prostitutes whose conduct demands their
expulsion, was apparently not used frequently before the last decade of
the nineteenth century, except against troublesome Pathans and Arabs,
belonging respectively to the transfrontier region or to the territory
of Indian Princes. But the immigration of foreign women must have begun
tentatively during the _régime_ of Sir Frank Souter and continued to
expand under the auspices of the international procurer, until by the
last years of the nineteenth century these unfortunates had secured a
strong foothold in certain houses situated in Tardeo, Grant road and
other streets of the Byculla ward.
The growth of the European population, resulting from the expansion of
the trade of the port, and an increasing disinclination on the part
of Government and society to countenance the old system of _liaisons_
with Indian women, may have induced the authorities to regard the
establishment of the European brothel and the presence of the European
prostitute as deplorable but necessary evils. Provided that the women
were kept under reasonable control and the police were sufficiently
vigilant to ensure the non-occurrence of open scandals, no direct steps
were taken to abolish a feature of urban life which struck occasional
travellers and others as inexpressibly shocking. To the peripatetic
procurer, who visited Bombay at frequent intervals in order to relieve
the women of their savings and ascertain the demand for fresh arrivals,
the Police showed no mercy; and the regular use which they made of the
Foreigners Act towards the close of the last century indicates that
by that date Bombay (like Calcutta and Madras) had become a regular
halting-point in the procurer’s disgraceful itinerary from Europe to the
Far East.
It must be remembered that the number of European professional
prostitutes in India has never been large, and the worst features of the
traffic, as understood in Europe, are fortunately absent. That is to
say, the women of this class who find their way to the brothels of the
Grant Road neighbourhood and to the less secluded rooms in and around
the notorious Cursetji Suklaji street, which used to be known on this
account as _safed gali_ or “white lane”, are not decoyed thither by
force or fraud. The women usually arrive unaccompanied and of their own
choice, and they are well over the age of majority before they first set
foot on the Bombay _bandar_. Their treatment in the brothel is not bad
and they are not subjected to cruelty. The “mistress” of the brothel,
who is herself a time-expired prostitute and has sometimes paid a heavy
sum to her predecessor for the good-will of the house, feeds and houses
the women in return for 50 per cent of their daily earnings; and as her
own livelihood and capital are at stake, she is usually careful to see
that nothing occurs to give the house a bad name among her clientèle or
to warrant punitive action on the part of the police. The “mistress”
acts in fact as a buffer between the women of her house and the male
visitor, protecting the general interests and health of the former and
safeguarding the latter from theft and robbery by the women, who are
usually drawn from the lower strata of the population of eastern Europe
and who would, in the absence of such control, be liable to thieve and
quarrel, and would also commence visiting places of public resort, such
as the race-course, restaurants etc., and walking the streets of the
European quarter.
European women of this class are found only in the chief maritime cities
of India—Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Karachi and Rangoon, the only places
in India which contain a considerable miscellaneous European population.
Their total number is not large. Some of them doubtless were originally
victims of the “white-slave” trafficker; but their first initiation to
the life happened several years before they found their way to India,
with funds advanced to them by the pimp or, as they style him in their
jargon, “the fancy-man” who first led them astray. There have been
instances in Bombay of these women contriving to accumulate sufficient
savings in the course of ten or twelve years’ continuous prostitution
to enable them either to purchase the good-will of a recognized brothel
or to return to their own country and settle down there in comparative
respectability. One or two, with their savings behind them, have been
able to find a husband who was prepared to turn a blind eye to their
past. Thus has lower middle-class respectability been secured at the
price of years of flaming immorality. But such cases are rare. These
women as a class are wasteful and improvident, and are prone to spend
all their earnings on their personal tastes and adornment. Most of them
also, as remarked above, have become acquainted early in their career
with a procurer, usually a Jew of low type, who swoops down at intervals
from Europe upon the brothel in which they happen to be serving and there
relieves them of such money as they may have saved after paying the
recognized 50 per cent to the “mistress” of the house.
During Colonel Wilson’s Commissionership little mention is made of action
by the police against the foreign procurer. The latter was probably not
so much in evidence as he was at a later date. The opening years of the
twentieth century witnessed a change, however, in this respect, and
a short time before the outbreak of the Great War, the Government of
India made a special enquiry into the scope and character of European
prostitution in India, in consequence of the submission to the Imperial
Legislature of a private Bill designed to suppress the evil. The report
on the subject submitted at that date (1913) by the Commissioner of
Police, Bombay, was directly responsible for a decision to give the
police wider powers of control over the casual visits of European
procurers—a decision which was carried into effect after the close of
the War by strengthening the provisions of the local Police Act and
the Foreigners Act. In 1921 the Government of India was represented at
an International Conference on the Traffic in Women and Children, held
at Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations; and shortly
afterwards India became a signatory of the International Convention of
1910, by which all the States concerned bind themselves to carry out
certain measures designed to check and ultimately to abolish the traffic.
There is little else to chronicle concerning the work of the police under
Colonel Wilson. The arrangements for the visits of the late Prince Albert
Victor and the Cesarewitch in 1890 were carried through without a hitch,
despite the acknowledged inadequacy of the force. The annual Moslem
pilgrimage to Mecca brought to Bombay yearly about 8000 pilgrims, whose
passports and steamer-tickets were supplied by Messrs. Thomas Cook and
Sons, the general supervision of the pilgrims and their embarkation at
the docks being performed by the Protector of Pilgrims and a small staff,
in collaboration with the Port Health officer. The period was remarkable
for the establishment of several temperance movements in various parts
of the City, which were declared in 1891 to have imposed a check upon
wholesale drunkenness. No diminution, however, of the volume of crime
against property was recorded, despite the activities of the Detective
Branch and the action taken by the divisional police against receivers
of stolen property, of whom 80 were convicted in 1889 and 64 in the
following year. The property annually recovered by the police in cases
of theft and house-breaking amounted to about 50 per cent of the value
stolen, the paucity of the constabulary being the chief reason for the
non-detection of constant thefts and burglaries which occurred in Mahim
and other outlying areas. Considering how greatly he was handicapped by
lack of numbers, ill-health among the rank and file, and the absence
of proper accommodation for both officers and men, Colonel Wilson’s
administration may be said to have been fairly successful. Fortunately
he was spared the task of dealing with any serious outbreak of disorder,
such as occurred during the early days of his successor’s term of office.