̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Kevin Greenbank

A glimpse of India

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 10:45:02 +0000

For most people, owning a mobile phone also means owning a video camera. There is no cost at all in sharing with others the scenes you film, thanks to YouTube and other such sites, so you can film nearly everything you do. In 1935, this was not the case. A cine film camera was expensive, film was not cheap and developing it was particularly pricey. You could not waste hours of expensive film waiting for your cat to do something funny, your baby to belch hilariously or some stranger’s dog to chase deer across a national park. People filming home movies had, therefore, to be more selective about what they filmed. There is as much difference between one of these films and most YouTube clips as there is between a letter written in 1935 and the majority of the emails you have sent recently.

As the archivist of the Centre of South Asian Studies’ Collection, I am effectively responsible for a set of home movies which, when analysed, bears great resemblance to the sort of documents historians, anthropologists and others working in the arts, humanities and social sciences have relied on for many years. Some, like newspapers, document significant events. In our own collections, for example, we have film of the funeral of Lord Brabourne (Gradwell 1), footage of the aftermath of the Quetta earthquake of 1935 (Berridge 4), a train derailed by pro-independence activists in c.1938 (Berridge 5) and two very harrowing films of the catastrophic results of the mass migrations that followed Partition in 1947 (Williams 1 and 2) as well as footage of refugees arriving in Lahore in the same period (Burtt 3 and 7). Others, a bit like official documents, show the working of the Empire, the ways in which the infrastructure of the Raj was built, such as the building of the railways (Berridge 1), or the vast canal systems of the North-West (Stokes 12 and 13).

Some of the films are similar in tone to the letters in our paper archive – made to be sent home so that people could show those back in the UK what their new life was like, such as the first few films of the Hunter Collection, which are actually filmed to look like a letter inviting viewers on a holiday to India and showing them what they will see when they arrive. And some show, often accidentally, the lives of Indian people (Banks 5), as well as the lives of the British who ran the Imperial system – the garden parties (Meiklejohn 8), hunting/horse-riding (Banks 2) social gatherings and sports, and also more personal, domestic scenes in which we are shown the homes and gardens of British India (Stokes 3).

̽��ֱ��Collection is perhaps most interesting, though, when the films reveal something unintended by the film-maker, enabling an insight into the situation in which the film was made or into the mindset of the person holding the camera. ̽��ֱ��writer of a letter, diary or government document is able to exercise absolute control of the narrative that is presented, but this is not always the case in a film, as those being filmed can act in ways that tell us more about the context in which the document was created.

Two examples jump out at me – one is a flippant example of what films can reveal, the other asks some interesting and important questions about social attitudes and about what a British woman is willing to have her audience see when viewing the films she made, or about what is acceptable in certain social settings. I shall leave these deeper questions without an answer, though – my role as an archivist is to prepare, preserve and present our collections, not to interpret them. There is, however, a growing branch of academic study which is using film collections such as ours as tools for visual anthropological study: the work of my colleague Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes would be an excellent starting point for those who wish to read further on this subject, and a good deal of it is based on the films mentioned in this article.

̽��ֱ��two films come from the Kendall Collection and both are, somewhat unusually, made by a woman, Lady Kendall, who was the wife of a judge in Allahabad. Kendall 1 shows mainly domestic scenes: the garden being tended, a children’s party, people walking in the family garden. Towards the end there is footage of a wedding. These scenes are interspersed with footage of Indian agricultural workers operating an irrigation system. This juxtaposition is, in itself, interesting.

While it shows the lifestyle of an affluent member of British Indian society, however, it also reveals something quite simple. It is clear that this was the first film taken on a new camera. You can tell this not because of the quality of the footage, but because of the way the camera was used – the film-maker treats it like a still camera. She points it at an object or scene, captures the image and then turns it off. What this leaves is a dizzying collection of short clips, mostly lasting between one and two seconds. Even when longer scenes are filmed – the wedding at the end or the agricultural scenes, for example – these are taken in short episodes. In the whole 10 minutes of the film, there are very few times when the camera is turned on for longer than four or five seconds. It is very difficult to watch, and even harder to watch to the end without getting a headache.

It is entirely understandable, however. We are used to watching what we have filmed straight away, and if we are doing something wrong, we can correct it with our next recording. Lady Kendall had to wait until the film she was using was completely recorded and then take it to be developed. Given that she shot 10 minutes of film in sections of a few seconds at a time, it is likely that it took quite a while to fill the whole reel. After viewing it she corrects her use of the camera – if you watch the whole Collection, you will see that the shots in subsequent films gradually lengthen.

Kendall III is more complex, although it also has at its heart the problems associated with making the switch from taking photographs to shooting films. In this film, Lady Kendall shows a picnic in the hills. After showing a group of friends (and a larger group of bearers and other servants) making their way up to the picnic site, she tries to take what is essentially a photograph of the scene, composing it to suit what she wants the image to show. She does this, though, with the cine camera running.

This provides us with a very revealing moment – it starts 42 seconds into the film (just after footage of a tennis match and some shots of mountains), and only lasts a second. Standing behind the people, seated on their blankets and smiling and laughing through their sandwiches, is a servant in livery.

For some reason, Lady Kendall, who has been quite happy to show the servants involved in carrying the picnic things up the mountain, does not wish to have this servant in this shot, so she asks one of the party to stand and obscure him from the camera’s view. ̽��ֱ��servant initially sways slightly to his right to try and stay in the shot, but then steps across to his left, remaining firmly visible. ̽��ֱ��friend moves back across to block him again, clearly taking direction of where she should stand, at which point Lady Kendall stops filming.

This attempt to create a mise-en-scène clearly fails, but in doing so it opens up many questions and lines of enquiry. Why the servant wants to remain in the shot, where he is clearly not wanted, for example. It also suggests that there are some situations in which it is acceptable for servants to be shown in the film, and others where it is not. Why this might be is not immediately clear, but this does show that a film can helpfully shed light on social attitudes, conventions and mores in a way that a written account would not. A diary entry or letter about this picnic would have simply not mentioned the presence of the servant, obscuring him far more effectively than Lady Kendall’s friend is able to do in this short piece of footage.

Inset images: stills from the Kendall III film (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive).

This article was first published in CAM Issue 75 (2015).

Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, explores the ways in which the home movie offers fascinating insights into the lives of those in front of, and behind, the camera – as rare footage of a 1935 Raj picnic shows.

̽��ֱ��Collection is perhaps most interesting when the films reveal something unintended by the film-maker

Kevin Greenbank

A glimpse of India

Centre of South Asian Studies

Stills from the Kendall III film

̽��ֱ��Centre of South Asian Studies Archive

̽��ֱ��Centre of South Asian Studies’ film archive was largely collected by its remarkable first archivist, Mary Thatcher, who was commissioned in 1967 to begin a search for archival material that was otherwise in danger of being lost.

Her brief was to focus on ordinary British men and women who worked in India, either in the Civil Service or its associated governmental concerns, those who lived in the Princely States, or were in the private sector, or served as missionaries or teachers. ̽��ֱ��resulting trawl of families who had returned to Britain after Independence has resulted in an archive of international importance and renown.

̽��ֱ��Collection deals mostly with the British in India (Indian collections would generally be restored to Indian archives, rather than being kept out of the country) and includes papers, photographs and films, and an oral history collection.

The unique collection of amateur cine films comprises films mostly made in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Where the archive has a film, it also normally has accompanying papers and photographs, providing a rare level of documentation and analysis.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie and the sad sailor

lw355 — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 13:02:36 +0000

A woman peeks from the curtain of a wagon, rich men parade on a bejewelled elephant and a pensive scholar clutches the tools of his trade: these paintings, no bigger than playing cards, adorn transparent sheets of mica and were bought in India as souvenirs by sailor Charles Augustus Whitehouse in 1842.

They were painted in India for the colonial tourist trade and are so rare and fragile that Dr Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, admits “I get the shakes when I handle these.”

“They represent an important period in Indian art – the Company School of painting – when Indian art developed perspective,” he adds. Some depict courtly scenes, while others appear to be sets of costumed characters or Indian pastimes and trades.

̽��ֱ��collection has 69 mica paintings. Their vibrant images are remarkably intact despite the fragility of mica – a transparent mineral – which may have been used by the painters in order to imitate the European trend for painting on glass. There are also six paintings on pipal leaves.

Today, they are held in the archives of the Centre for South Asian Studies, which houses a unique collection of letters, diaries, photographs and films belonging to ordinary British people who documented their lives in India and South Asia.

“What I especially like about the mica paintings is they accompany a pair of diaries written by a sailor who bought them when he stopped in India on his was from Liverpool to India on the Brig Medina.”

Unlike many diaries that have become a source of historical information, Whitehouse’s are a deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic account – so much so that they were often written as if there was no-one else on board.

Entitled ̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie, the diaries are inscribed to his mother, and come with a caveat scrawled across the front “Here it comes something hot from the oven. Mind your eye or it may burn your fingers.”

Alongside his self-portrait, seascapes, a map of his route and a smattering of voyage details – “Potato cakes for tea” – Whitehouse begins to dwell on his lost sweetheart back home, stolen away, he says, by another man: “Hanging, drawing and quartering would be really too good for such an intruder.”

As the Brig continues to be becalmed, the pages fill with plaintive poetry “Love in a woman neer sinketh deep, Into the bosom she lets him creep… Love in a man is a far different thing, Forms more than roses it doth then bring.”

Eventually, many pages later, the sad sailor rallies, bringing his melancholic meanderings to an end with: “So I’ve blued and blued and bored and bored you until I work myself back into my usual good humour. Apres les pluit, les bonne temps. ̽��ֱ��storm is over and I feel much refreshed… after moping for a good half an hour I went below for a cigar.”

̽��ֱ��Centre of South Asian Studies archive comprises a unique collection of photos, papers, films and oral histories covering many aspects of life in South Asia.

www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/archive/archome.html

Inset images: paintings on mica (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive); Charles Augustus Whitehouse's self-portrait (Centre of South Asian Studies Archive).

̽��ֱ��idiosyncratic diaries of one man’s voyage from Liverpool to India, and the exquisite painted souvenirs he bought there, are among the treasures to be found in the archives at the Centre of South Asian Studies.

Here it comes something hot from the oven. Mind your eye or it may burn your fingers

Charles Augustus Whitehouse

̽��ֱ��sad sailor and ̽��ֱ��Sea-Pie

Centre of South Asian Studies Archive

Charles Augustus Whitehouse's diary and souvenirs

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Cambridge makes Hay

bjb42 — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 09:16:17 +0000

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge alumnus and Hay Festival director Peter Florence has invited the ̽��ֱ�� to contribute a third annual speaker series to the world-renowned Festival, held between May 27 and June 5.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Hay series is a spin-off from the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, and features outstanding communicators from the Cambridge academic community.

Up to 5,000 people are expected to attend the talks and discussions in the Cambridge series and this year ̽��ֱ��Telegraph is the Festival’s media partner.

Highlights this year include philosopher Baroness Onora O'Neill debating the limits of toleration in today's society and Dr Amrita Narlikar on the rise of new powers Brazil, India and China and their impact on global governance. Dr Narlikar heads Cambridge's new Centre for Rising Powers.

India is one of the focuses for this year's Festival and Dr Kevin Greenbank and Dr Annamaria Motrescu will lead a session entitled “ ̽��ֱ��Reel Raj: cinefilm and audio archive from the Centre of South Asian Studies”. This includes remarkable footage from some of the almost 300 home movies in their collection which offer a unique glimpse of life in India and other parts of South Asia during the final days of the British Empire.

Hay audiences can also look forward to Dr Ha-Joon Chang on 23 myths of capitalism and Professor Tony Wrigley in conversation with George Monbiot, discussing a new look at the industrial revolution and the links between the industrial revolution and our current energy crisis. Professor Nicky Clayton will talk about her research on crow behaviour which was featured in a series of online films made available by the ̽��ֱ��.

And with an event which may appeal to adults and children alike, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press Chief Executive Stephen Bourne will speak about the company’s decision to adopt a giant panda at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Foundation in China – a bid to build closer working links with the country and to help protect the endangered species.

Other speakers include:

Dr Simon Mitton, on the books that have changed our view of the universe, from Alexandria to Cambridge
Professor Michael Lamb on children in the legal system
Professor Gerry Gilmore on whether science claims to know the unknowable
Professor Rosamond McKitterick on history, memory and ideas about the past
Dr Ulinka Rublack on dress codes in Renaissance Europe
Dr Clive Oppenheimer on eruptions that shook the world
Professor Simon Blackburn on the relationship between language and action, pragmatism, and practical reasoning.
Dr Rachel Polonsky on Molotov, one of Stalin's fiercest henchmen.

Nicola Buckley, currently Head of Community Affairs, said: “ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is delighted to be contributing its speaker series to the Hay Festival once again. We welcome the Festival director’s vision to open up Cambridge research on historic and contemporary India, among many other topics, to the Hay audience, and we look forward to lively talks and debates.”

̽��ֱ��full line-up for the Cambridge series at the Hay Festival is:

Fri 27/5, 5.15pm

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys

Cambridge Series 1 - " ̽��ֱ��Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus".

Reconciling conflicting Gospel accounts and scientific evidence, the distinguished Cambridge physicist reveals the exact date of the Last Supper in a definitive new timeline of Holy Week and offers a complete reassessment of the final days of Jesus.

Fri 27/5, 6.30pm Professor John Barrow

̽��ֱ��Book of Universes

̽��ֱ��mathematician encounters universes where the laws of physics can change from time to time and from one region to another, universes that have extra hidden dimensions of space and time, universes that are eternal, universes that live inside black holes, universes that end without warning, colliding universes, inflationary universes, and universes that come into being from something else – or from nothing at all.

Fri 27/5, 7.45pm Dr Simon Mitton

From Alexandria to Cambridge

̽��ֱ��historian of astronomy examines of Five Books That Changed Our View of the Universe: Ptolemy's Almagest, Copernicus' De Revolutionibus, Galileo's Siderius Nuncius and Dialogo, and Newton's Principia. A facsimile of the Copernicus manuscript will be displayed.

Sat 28/5, 2.30pm Professor Michael Lamb

Angels, Demons, Dunces

̽��ֱ��developmental forensic psychologist examines our inconsistent views of children in the legal system.

Sun 29/5, 2.30pm Dr Ha-Joon Chang

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

̽��ֱ��economist turns all received wisdom about free markets, globalisation and the digital revolution on its head and offers an utterly compelling alternative. Chaired by Jesse Norman of the Treasury Select Committee.

Mon 30/5, 4pm Professor Tony Wrigley

Opening Pandora's Box: a New Look at the Industrial Revolution

All material production requires energy. All pre-industrial economies derived the bulk of their energy from agriculture. Production horizons were tightly bounded. ̽��ֱ��use of fossil fuel overcame this limitation. Chaired by George Monbiot.

Tues 31/5, 1130 Stephen Bourne

Panda-monium: social responsibility in China

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press has adopted the young giant panda Jian Qiao at the Chengdu Research Foundation in China. Its CEO reports on the practicalities and symbolism of this new relationship, and we'll meet Jian Qiao on the big screen.

Tues 31/5, 1pm Professor Simon Blackburn

Practical Tortoise Raising

̽��ֱ��Philosopher explores the relationship between language and action, pragmatism, pluralism and practical reasoning.

Tues 31/5, 1pm Professor Clive Oppenheimer

Eruptions That Shook ̽��ֱ��World

̽��ֱ��volcanologist explores geological, historical and archaeological records to ask how volcanic eruptions have shaped the trajectory of human society through prehistory and history. He looks at the evidence for

volcanic cataclysm and considers how we can prepare ourselves for future catastrophes.

Tues 31/5, 5.30pm Dr Amrita Narlikar

̽��ֱ��Rise of New Powers and the Challenges of Global Trade Governance

No good deed goes unpunished: the WTO’s timely response to accommodate the new powers – Brazil, China, and India – at the heart of its decision-making has created new opportunities but also generated unanticipated new problems. What insights can be learnt about the rise of new powers within the WTO and in other multilateral organisations?

Tues 31/5, 7pm Dr Kevin Greenbank / Dr Annamaria Motrescu

̽��ֱ��Reel Raj: cinefilm and audio archive

An overview of the digital holdings of the Centre of South Asian Studies and their potential in the teaching of British and South Asian imperial history. Chaired by Hannah Rothschild.

Weds 1/6, 11.30am Professor Gerry Gilmore

Past, present and infinite future?

Was there anything before the beginning, why does science claim to know the apparently unknowable; where do I come from? What do we know about the infinite future?

Weds 1/6, 4pm Rev Dr John Polkinghorne

Quantum Theory

" ̽��ֱ��mathematician, theoretical physicist and priest explains the strange and exciting ideas that make the subatomic world so different from the world of the every day."

Thurs 2/6, 2.30pm Dr Ulinka Rublack

Dressing Up: Cultural identity in Renaissance Europe

Historian Dr Rublack will show why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. Her research imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people´s appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves.

Thurs 2/6, 5.30pm Dr Rachel Polonsky

Molotov's Magic Lantern

A luminous, original and unforgettable exploration of a country and its literature, viewed through the eyes of Vyacheslav Molotov, one of Stalin's fiercest henchmen.

Fri 3/6, 2.30pm Professor Nicky Clayton

̽��ֱ��Ape On Your Bird Table

Crows are as smart as apes. They manufacture tools, they are socially sophisticated, and they plan where to cache for tomorrow's breakfast. These findings have led to a re-evaluation of avian cognition, and resulted in a theory that intelligence evolved independently in apes and crows.

Sat 4/6, 2.30pm Professor Rosamond McKitterick

History, Memory and Ideas About the Past

̽��ֱ��historian focuses on uses of memory and the problems of the relation between memory and written, especially narrative and records of memory. Particular memories can also be exploited to reinforce an identity or even an ideology. Modern historians have distinguished between official and popular history and memory, as well as collective and individual manifestations and uses of memory. She will explore how helpful modern experience may be in interpreting the distant past. Case studies of historical narratives and epitaphs inscribed on stone from the early middle ages (c. 500-c.900) will serve to highlight both the kind of material with which an early medieval historian works, and its implications for historical knowledge and interpretation more generally.

Sun 5/6, 2.30pm Baroness Onora O'Neill

Is Toleration Still A Virtue?

̽��ֱ��philosopher is an exacting examiner of great issues such as freedom of speech, assisted suicide and

stem cell research. Here she explores a fundamental assumption of liberal societies.

̽��ֱ��books that have changed our view of the Universe, eruptions that shook the world and Stalin's fiercest henchmen are just some of the themes that will be under discussion during the popular Cambridge Series at this year's Hay Literary Festival.

We welcome the vision to open up Cambridge research on historic and contemporary India, among many other topics, to the Hay audience.

Nicola Buckley

Peter Curbishley from Flickr

Hay Festival

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Yes

̽��ֱ��Elephant Man

bjb42 — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:55:29 +0000

Letters, diaries and - remarkably - amateur films shot during the expedition, which was organised by a British tea planter called Gyles Mackrell, will be examined in detail following their donation to the Centre of South Asian Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

A short film, chronicling the epic rescue mission and using the footage that Mackrell took himself, is available to view above.

It explains how, amid the chaos of the British retreat from Burma early in 1942, Mackrell mounted an operation to save refugees who were trapped by flooded rivers at the border with India using the only means available to get them across - elephants.

Dr. Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies, where the collection will be housed, said: " ̽��ֱ��story is a sort of Far Eastern Dunkirk, but it has largely been forgotten since the war. Without the help of Mackrell and others like him, hundreds of people fleeing the Japanese advance would quite simply never have made it."

Born in 1889, Gyles Mackrell was 53 when, in January 1942, the Japanese invaded British-held Burma. He had spent most of his life in Assam, where he was working as an area supervisor for Steel Brothers, a firm exporting tea.

̽��ֱ��initial Japanese advance was devastating. Burma's capital, Rangoon, was evacuated in March and by April the army was in full retreat. This prompted a massive evacuation, in which tens of thousands of people, many of them wounded, sick and starving, were forced to trek on foot for hundreds of miles, through dense jungle, in the hope of reaching the Indian border

and safety. Large numbers died on the way.

Even those who made it to the border, however, struggled to find a way into India. By May, the torrential monsoon rains had flooded the narrow river passes dividing the two countries. Crossing on foot was impossible and the British administration did not have the resources or local knowledge to help.

As a result, groups of refugees began to camp out on the banks of rivers hoping that the waters might recede or that a rescue might come. Many were kept alive by the RAF, which dropped food supplies wherever it could.

It was in the absence of any organised evacuation that tea planters like Mackrell became the refugees' only hope. Through his work, Mackrell had access to elephants, which were the only reliable means of crossing the flooded rivers. Importantly, he also knew the jungle and local hill tribes.

His diary, which forms part of the collection, reveals how Mackrell received an SOS on 4 June, 1942, from a group of refugees who had managed to cross the Dapha River by making a human chain. "I promised to collect some elephants and move off as quickly as I could," he wrote, "as they told me the party behind would be starving, especially if they got held up by the rivers."

In a series of epic forced marches Mackrell reached the Dapha by 9 June, and almost immediately sighted a group of 68 soldiers who had been trapped on an island mid-river when the waters suddenly rose.

Despite their best efforts, his party could not reach them at first - the films Mackrell shot show elephants up to their tusks in raging rapids, unable to make any progress at all. Then, miraculously, the river fell briefly in the small hours of the morning and a window opened in which the soldiers were evacuated.

In the weeks that followed, Mackrell and his colleagues set up camp on the Dapha and helped across a stream of refugees.

They themselves were frequently short of supplies and afflicted by fever, and at one stage Mackrell himself had to go back to Assam to recover, before returning to the Dapha as soon as he was fit.

When operations finally ceased in September 1942, about 200 people had been saved - the last group against instructions from the British administration in Assam which, acting on faulty intelligence, thought that the party had moved off and were ordering Mackrell to pull out.

̽��ֱ��collection at Cambridge has been donated by Mackrell's niece and an independent researcher, Denis Segal. It includes not just his films and diaries, but papers and accounts by some of those who were rescued.

̽��ֱ��diary of John Rowland, a railroad engineer whose party were some of the last to get across, captures the desperate nature of the refugees' situation. At one stage the group was so short of food, they were eating fern fronds.

"There is no nutriment in the additional diet," Rowland wrote, "at all events it forms bulk and with luck it is hoped to spin out the rations for 24 days, after which, if no relief party or aeroplane arrives with rations, it is recognised that we must die of starvation." In the event a plane spotted the party and dropped supplies just in time.

Also in the collection is a short note by Sir R E Knox, from the Treasury's Honours Committee in London, recommending that the percentage risk of death Mackrell faced during the evacuation "could be put, very roughly, at George Medal: 50 to 80%."

Mackrell did eventually receive the George Medal - about which he was always modest - and died in retirement in Suffolk in 1959. Briefly, in 1942, the British press celebrated his achievement, dubbing him " ̽��ֱ��Elephant Man", but as the war progressed in Burma, his exploits became a forgotten footnote eclipsed by the achievements of what was, in any case, referred to as Britain's "forgotten army".

̽��ֱ��collection, now with the Centre of South Asian Studies, will now give researchers the chance to revive the tale not just of Mackrell, but others like him who helped to save hundreds of people during the desperate summer of 1942.

"Mackrell was embarrassed by the attention he received and even worried that people would think he had returned to the Dapha in the pursuit of a second medal," Dr. Annamaria Motrescu, research associate at the Centre, said. "In fact it's a remarkable story of courage, spirit and ingenuity that took place at a time when no-one was sure what the consequences of the war in the Far East would be. It deserves to be remembered."

̽��ֱ��remarkable story of a daring World War II operation in which hundreds of people fleeing the Japanese advance through Burma were rescued by elephant is to be told in full for the first time.

̽��ֱ��story is a sort of Far Eastern Dunkirk, but it has largely been forgotten since the war. Without the help of Mackrell and others like him, hundreds of people fleeing the Japanese advance would quite simply never have made it.

Dr. Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre of South Asian Studies

Imperial War Museum

Elephants crossing river

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Yes