Essays & Articles << In Search of the Blackheath Golfer
In Search of the Blackheath Golfer
The last testament did, however, reveal the existence of another woman in the life of the Blackheath goffer, a virtual second wife by whom he’d had three children! I wanted to break in and press my magnifier up against his face to check for character flaws, but further details of his will seemed to defend his honour. Neil affirmed that the document treated Ann Innes and Agnes Palmer with equal affection. Then, there was Ann’s will, which did make reference to the oil painting: “The portrait of my late husband over the chimney piece in the Blue Parlour I give to Mrs. Mitchell (one of the ‘illigitimate’ daughters).” But it wound up in the possession of Agnes’ son, William. Probably, Neil reasoned, because golf was a ‘boy thing’. William Palmer, in turn, had a son, Henry, who served overseas with the Indian Army. So, there it was -- the India connection. There now remained only the question of the fire. I read on.
Henry Palmer lived a long life, according to Neil, during the latter part of which he published a volume called Indian Life Sketches, from which Neil quoted: “For as long as I can remember, and up to the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny on the night of 30th May, 1857, when my house at Lucknow was burned down with every scrap in it, there was always before me, either in my father’s house or mine, an oil painting, full size, of a gentleman standing in a field, holding a golf club...”
I should have felt exuberant, and I did, sort of. I had an urge to phone my wife and tell her, and I would have, had I not felt so much like throwing up.
I slept most of the next day in an ancient stone hotel. Apparently, Robbie Burns’ birthplace was just up the road. On Tuesday, first thing, I returned to Pringles and examined Capt. Innes under the magnifier. It was the proof I needed. My print, though a treasure to me, was probably worth little more than I paid for it. For his, Bob Pringle wanted £15,000.
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I had a single evening in Glasgow before flying home. The proprietor of a smelly bookshop, open late because his wife was holding a seance in their flat, located a hardcover entitled The Great Mutiny. Someone had long ago spilled a glass of red wine in it, so the pages almost broke off as I turned to a chapter called “The Seige of Lucknow”. A few British officers controlled an entire subcontinent until the spring of 1857, when Hindus and Moslems serving in the British Army refused to lick cartridges greased with pig and cow fat. In the widespread revolt, British women and children were butchered or thrown alive and screaming into wells, while their homes and trappings went up in flames. Standing there, holding that book stained blood-brown, I had a sense of landing in the present tense, one that became even more lucid as I continued to read -- about the nightly 9 o’clock gun ricocheting off minaret and temple throughout the ancient city of Lucknow, and the British General, warned that it could signal an attack, calmly setting his watch, then rising from the dinner table and moving to the verandah where he listens into the pre-monsoon night. “Captain!” he shouts back into the house, “Your friends are not punctual!” He chuckles and returns to his dinner guests, but before he sits down musket shots bring the party running to the porch to see a muggy sky already pulsing red over the officers’ cantonment.I’m no longer reading because I’m there inside the bungalow of Colonel Henry Palmer, where flames are swimming up the curtains, boiling wallpaper and blackening Wedgewood china. On the wall, the portrait of Palmer’s grandfather is melting, the paramilitary tunic running red down his breeches onto gold-buckled shoes, the long-nosed driver warping and his broad-brimmed top hat dripping down the curls of his white wig and onto a pretty face that seems destined to last forever.
