Empire: World History - 12. Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Join William and Anita as they discuss the extraordinary life of Princess Sophia. Her story includes a debut at Buckingham Palace, a meeting with Gandhi, fierce involvement in the suffragette movement, and the First World War. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire Twitter: @EmpirePodUk goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Well, hello and welcome to Empire with me, William Derrimple. And me, Anita Arnaz, I don't like this. Why are we doing it the other way around? That was the longest pause ever. But I won't get on your case, Anita. I won't get on your case.

Anyway, today we have a particularly tricky guest, the wonderful Anita Arland. Oh, she's awful. She's written a very good book. You could have given that much more of a tug. She's written a very good book called Sophia. Sophia Sophia, what you call her? Sophia, Sophia.

Princess. Sophia. She would have called herself Sophia. Sophia, Princess, suffragette, revolutionary. And it is, I have to say, one of those stories as a non-fiction writer, when you see that somebody else has written it, you do suffer a little surge of envy

because it's kind of a perfect story. It's an astonishingly good story. It takes our old friend, the Coenor, which is why we're doing it now, almost as a sort of epilogue to our quartet of Coenor episodes. It has Ranjit Singh, dolyp sing,

but it has also a whole new world of people that link this astonishing world of the Sikh court and the Sikh wars and all that sort of extraordinarily exotic stuff happening in 1840s India with the new world. She is a suffragette. She meets Gandhi. She is part of the freedom struggle. She's facing off against Churchill. And so it's an extraordinary link between two worlds that seem sort of unbridgedible. and yet her life brings them together. Aren't you lovely?

Aren't you lovely? I was honestly, I'd fasten my seatbelt and I'd put on my crash helmet for that introduction, but I've got off quite well. How nice of you. Actually, a very learned and respected critic, put it this way, after the book came out saying,

you, madam, are a lucky, lucky cow. Isn't that nice? To come across a story like that for your first book. And I'll wear that, I'll take it. Have there been any book about it before or was this literally one that you dug up from? No, no. It was entirely born out of frustration. So the whole story of this book is, I mean, you know my long suffering husband very well.

It was while I was on maternity leave and there was, yes, my wonderful long, he's a very wonderful man. But during maternity leave, what happened was I was sort of trying to be very quiet. I can't imagine you ever being very quiet. It was my one and very short-lived trappist silence phase. So I just turned off all radios and TVs, and I just read everything. That was everything, anything, and everything. Which included sort of the kind of mail and local magazines and things that would have gone straight into the dustbin. And so it was one of these days when I was looking through a local magazine,

and it said suffragette selling newspaper outside Hampton court. And even though it was a sepia print, there was something about, the picture that told me this woman, the suffragette, selling the newspaper of the suffragettes, I said suffragette revolution on the sandwich board next to her, was what was Indian. Even more than that, was Punjabi. I mean, you've heard of Gaydar. I always say this when I do the talk. We have Punjabis can tell another one from space.

So that's what started it, really. I started trying to find out more about her and then bored my husband rigid and he said, just write it down. I'm actually looking at the picture this minute, which is now, of course, on the cover of your paperback. And it does indeed show this woman in a very expensive fur coat. So she's not poor wearing a very fashionable, turned up sort of 1910 era hat. And she's standing by a poster board for the suffra jet in huge block capitals. and the one-word banner headline that you'd associate more with some sort of tabloid from today. But it just says, revolution, exclamation mark.

But this woman, who's clearly well-off and is supporting the suffragette cause, is very clearly, as you say, an Indian face. It's a classic North Indian face and very beautiful, actually. And she's, and very striking. And you're right. These are two words which sort of two worlds which you wouldn't expect to come together. So what did you do when you were researching this? How did you put it together? So I did, you know, being a journalist, I always take the path of greatest laziness.

I rang up the magazine and I said, who's this then? Who'd at? And they literally, there wasn't even a caption. Well, I mean, if it, no. I mean, I might be in my sort of sleep deprived, befuddled, you know, state. I didn't catch it. but they said, oh, it's Sophia DeLeep Singh. And I said, can you tell me anything about her?

And they said, Sophia Deleap Singh from Hampton Court is what we can tell you. And I was like, this is really crazy. I guess, I mean, making it worse, I'm a political journalist, making it worse, worse, worse, is my husband is a Singh and I'm now a Singh. So how do I not know about this woman? So I try to find a book, because that's what a typically lazy journalist would do. And there just wasn't one. So then I did, I started researching this story, as I would.

a contemporary story. I thought, okay, I'll look for cuttings. And I very quickly found that there were two piles of cuttings, which bore no resemblance to each other. And they seem to be talking about a different person. So on the one side, there were cuttings about this beautiful society, princess, and everything she wore was fashionable and where she bought her jewels and how she did her hair and things like that. And on the other side, Harrodin, Princess, Trater's daughter, you know, ungrateful immigrant. And I thought, how are these two the same person? And that started the obsession. And it is, and it is in a sense that conflict that animates the book. It is the charge that keeps the thing going because she does indeed embrace completely different worlds,

that two utterly different worlds that you'd never imagine coming together in one life. So let's go back to her dad, who we've covered a little bit before in our, in our Co-Inore episode. But in case the listeners here have not heard that, who was her dad, Dulip Singh? So her father, Dulip Singh, was the beautiful boy king who Queen Victoria becomes obsessed with. He is dispossessed of his kingdom and of his Coenor diamond by Lord Dalhousie, who wants the diamond, who wants to have this experience of not only just taking the lucrative north of India, but presenting on this cushion the diamond that represents in the world. India to Queen Victoria.

And in the process of doing that, this little boy is expelled from Punjab and he's given to the foster care of a Scottish couple called the Logans. He decides he wants to meet the Maharani of the world at one point and Queen Victoria really very much wants to meet him because she keeps getting updates about how beautiful and wonderful. And Christian he is. He embraces Christianity as well and by doing so really upsets his already heart-brose. broken people in Punjab. So he's the kind of model Victorian prince. He's absolutely poster boy for what the British would like the Indian princes to be. Picturesque, gorgeous, exotic and deeply loyal.

Well, and for Victoria, you know, even more than that, somebody who is deeply Christian, he's a gateway to the Christianisation of India. You know, his soul is saved and maybe everybody else's soul can be saved in the same way. So there are many reasons that she's interested in him. But when he comes to England, he is completely sort of swept up in the royal family. He feels apart, a member of that family. And it's only when he gets older when he starts to think of a family of his own. And he realizes that he cannot actually live like his best friend Bertie.

And he can't spend the money that the Prince of Wales is spending. And he can't leave to his children what he feels he ought to be able to leave. Then he starts looking into the past and looking into how he was separated from his mother and forced to sign this treaty which signed everything over. And then he becomes this implacable enemy. Just before we go there to that, in a sense, that divorce to the moment that he turns against the royal family and begins to want to reclaim his lost kingdom. Just describe to me, because I remember you talking about this when you first came across

the papers, the queen and he sketching each other. Was it in the Isle of White? Oh, they're lovely. Yes, absolutely. So, yeah, no, and this is a really controversial thing to say in India, because in India, this is a really simple, straightforward binary story of a rapacious queen who takes everything from this poor Indian child. The truth is always more complicated than that. So when Dilip first comes to England, just bear in mind he's been separated from his mother since he was an infant. He has no family around him. And he's swept up in this royal family and taken into the bosom of the family. which means he often spends time at Osborne House, which is the inner sanctum for Queen Victoria and Albert. It's where they get away from everybody. And so it's while they are there, that this absolute love affair, and it's not a sexual love affair, but it is a real love develops. The two of them spent ages. You're quite right. Sitting and looking at each other and sketching each other. And these very tender portraits still exist in the Royal Collection. You can go and see them yourself.

His impact on Victoria is even today evident because you'll see this resplendent picture, this portrait that was painted by Winterhalter, which hangs of Duleep Singh, despite everything, despite this whole detonation of their relationship later, which still hangs in Osborne House. She writes in her diary about how sweet he is to, you know, her youngest son Leopold,

who has hemophilia and is really picked on by the other royal kids, but Duleep always sort of scoops him up and puts him on his shoulders. So there is a real tenderness, which then explains why when, you know, he does start thinking of his own. First of all, she tries to arrange his marriage. I don't know if I mentioned that in the last time that we touched on Dalype Singh. But Queen Victoria tries to do exactly what his mother would have done in India, which is try and

find him a wife. And who does she want him to marry? Well, she has another interest who is Princess Garama of Kourg, who is also, you know, the child of an Indian, dispossessed Indian royal who has converted to Christianity. I mean, in that case, her father sort of converts himself and converts her as an attempt to hang onto his kingdom. And she's from Coug in southern India. Exactly right.

And it's very beautiful, you know, very beautiful little thing. South of modern Bangalore, up in the mountains. Exactly. Beloved by her father. But it's sort of given over almost as a gift to Queen Victoria that, you know, this is how much I trust you and I think you're going to do right by me and my kingdom. him take my daughter and she's your godchild for now. And this is a godchild of Queen Victoria.

And she grows up in Britain and she's quite flighty. She's quite a silly, giggly little thing. And when Dilip is first introduced to her, and it's also a great beauty like Dulip. With this ambition Queen Victoria has that these two will marry. And it's also a great beauty like Dulip. Yeah, very pretty. A little big dough eyes, big brown doe eyes.

I mean, they do, you know, they would have had beautiful babies. They would have, this would have worked. It would have been a beautiful thing. But it didn't work because he found her too flighty and too ridiculous. And also, I think, you know, he was having affairs at this time, even at this time as a young man, with women in court who were desperately glamorous and wildly. But who thought it was fine to flirt and have affairs. But my God, they wouldn't marry him because nobody wanted mongrel children.

And again, just before we plunge into the descent, at his peak, he's not only very very very, very very very very. very close to the royal family. He's got this enormous estate in Suffolk, Elvdalen. Yes. Yes, it's right on the Norfolk-Sufford. So if anyone's been to Thetford, that's still the most identifiable place on the map. And it is a crazy, it's crazy town at Elverton. So he buys it because he wants to be near Sandringham. The Prince of Wales has just recently bought Sandringham. And anything Bertie can do, Dillip can do better. There is this kind of brotherly rivalry between them. So he buys this house that used to belong to Admiral Keppel. That's my mother's family. You have said this before that you're related to everyone,

including God. Right. So the Keppel house is in Thetford as it was, was this quite austere, looked like Sandringham, you know, sort of a very big, blocky, you know, a house of substance and seriousness. And he buys it and then he completely wrecks it and rebuild it. In a sort of in a sort of Mughal style. There's Mughal rooms, isn't there? Yeah. Yeah, on the outside, Italian, inside it is like a Mughal Palace. I mean, there are furs and there are skins, and there is gold, and there is shisha work, mirror work on all the walls. What is most extraordinary, there's the wildlife that he keeps outside in the grounds of Elvden.

So he has... Baboons! He has these exotic birds that have flown over every year. Baboons chained up in the flower beds who are miserable and hate the local... There's a war that's going on that I found. in a local newspaper between the baboon and the local jackdore, which was sufficiently noisy that they wrote about it in their local park. But then there's also, you know, these parrots that he just keeps shipping over every year,

which drop out of the sky like right pairs, and he just ships in more because he's made this pleasure palace. He has a leopard pen outside the children's nursery. So they wake up to this sort of, you know, the strange noises of wild animals. And that they grow up at this place. He's also made the premier hunting estate. state in England. So, you know, the thing that the aristocracy loved to do more than anything in those times was get the biggest bag, you know, sort of bang things out of the skull. And Suffolk and Norfolk was very much the big shoot HQ, wasn't it? Those extraordinary

shoots of the Victorian period when thousands of birds would be brought down. And he's one of the best shots in the country. And you are literally talking about bags of thousands of birds, you know, sort of a hunting party. He himself could bring down 900 birds in, you know, a one day's outing. It's, they're ludicrous eye-watering numbers, his, his hunting statistics. But, you know, replenishing all of this and keeping this kind of lifestyle so that the Dukes and the Duchesses and the Prince of Wales, you know, is a regular guest at Elvdon, to keep up to that level, he keeps spending money that he thinks is his. He thinks that there is a settlement, an equitable settlement that's been made when he signed everything over, where he can carry on living like

at Maharaja. But very soon the bank, Coots, in this instance, starts returning his, his, his, bills saying, we're not going to, we're not paying this. You haven't got the money. We're not paying this. So you go to the Secretary of State for India saying, hang on a minute, but we agreed that you would let me live this lifestyle. And they said, well, don't know who agreed that, your majesty, but no. And so that sets, that sounds the relationship. So he begins to have to sell things off, or how does it, how does it play out? He starts actually upping the ante. So he starts being even more profligate and spending even more money and sending the bills daring them to give, you know, to bankrupt him.

And when it becomes clear that they really are going to bankrupt him, he then appeals to Queen Victoria and says, look, you've got to help me. This is crazy. Why am I being punished? I've been your most loyal servant. I've done everything that was expected of me. and also I was abused by your people as a child. You know, this is not legal. What happened?

This document cannot even be legal because I signed it as a minor. And you'd taken my mother away and who did I have to counsel me? And all of this falls on some rather deaf ears. I mean, Queen Victoria says, you know, I do feel sorry for your predicament. And she writes to others saying it is a shame. It's a shame what's happened. But she's like, I'm not going to do anything. I cannot cross my government.

This is, you know, you've made this bed. now you lie in it. So he then decides, right, if you're going to play like this, then I'm going to play nasty too. And he formulates this plan, which on paper, William, makes perfect sense. You know, this is the time of the great game, as you know. So Russia is flexing like crazy. So he thinks, okay, you know what? I will go back. I will go back to India. The Sikhs will rise up for me. And the Tsar, will come in on the other side and we will pincer the British

out of the north of India and it's going to work and that's his thought process when he drags his poor wife who we haven't spoken about yet who's also an extraordinary story but his wife and his six little children on a voyage a doomed voyage back to India he sells everything in Elvedon to pay for this

including the pheasant eggs I've seen receipts for the pheasant eggs that he sells to raise enough money to go back and start this war against Britain. So how far does he get He gets as far as Aidan. He gets as far as the Suez Canal. And then he is pulled off the boat and his family is pulled off the boat by a sweating resident who doesn't know what to do with them. Because he still has royal status.

You know, he's really famous. He's in all the, everyone knows who he is. He's in newspapers. He's in imperial portraits, which are still hanging galleries in this country. He is a friend of the queen. And yet he's pulled off and he's looking for guidance. What shall I do? And they just say, just keep him until he calls down.

And that is very much the directive coming from Queen Victoria. He needs to see sense and live within his means and just tell him to cool down, but he doesn't cool down. So he's held in this place in Aden. He is getting angrier and angrier and ratcheting up. His family are desperate. His poor wife, who is just such an extraordinary creature. She shouldn't be living this life.

Bamba Mueller. So if we just sort of for one second look back, and I apologize if this is confusing, but just, you know, previously on this conversation I mentioned, and we just have to look at Bamba for a moment. Bamber is not of royal blood. Bamba is a lot younger than him. And Bamba has been married to him because he's turned down all of the arranged marriages that Queen Victoria set before him. He's not interested in any of them. And at some point, he starts to feel quite anxious, out of place, disjointed and rejected by all these women who will flirt and have affairs with him but won't marry him. So he starts to look for somebody who will be as much of an outsider in the court as he feels. And to do that, but he also wants a pure virgin. Because, you know, he's He's clearly reviling everything that's gone on the people that he thought he loved and thought they loved him. So he wants the complete opposite. So he goes to this mission in Cairo. And he asks them, quite point blank, he says, do you have a girl?

I can marry. She has to be a virgin. She has to be pure. She has to be unworldly. And they say, we've got just the girl. And it is a young girl, an illegitimate child. Get this. Extraordinary story.

If you presented this as fiction back in the day, they would have turned it down. So she is the daughter, the illegitimate daughter of a, rich German merchant, Herr Mule, and an Abyssinian slave, who has a baby, and instead of acknowledging the child. I mean, it's straight, like, a rider haggard or something, isn't it? Yeah. Isn't it? And he just leaves the daughter in this cloister to be brought up by the mission.

And so they have this pure, pure girl in Bamber, who is so beautiful. I mean, that is the one thing again. She is, again, big brown eyes, huge eyelashes, round face, absolutely clear expression, completely guileless. And he meets her. She doesn't speak any English. He speaks no Arabic. They have to have a translator at their wedding. They meet once and he decides, yes, he's going to have her, because she's a very impressive trinket. And also, it's going to slightly get up the nose of Queen Victoria. And Queen Victoria, to her credit, when he comes back and goes, this is my wife. She doesn't speak a word of your language, but this is my wife who I chose

all by myself. She embraces Bamba as well. She sort of sees Bambor as a really pious, lovely girl who should be protected. And he goes through this wild phase of sort of treating her literally like a trophy wife. She has to learn English haltingly to even communicate with her husband. But what he does is sort of even, to me, even worse. He uses her almost like a mannequin. He starts designing her clothes for her. I mean, he designs her outfit. She wears fashions no one has ever seen in the world because they're a mixture of east, west, you know, And there are ladies in waiting to Queen Victoria going, what the hell is he doing to that poor girl?

Just leave her alone. And she is also permanently pregnant. You know, she has seven children. One of him dies in infancy. But she's almost permanently pregnant to this point where, now if we can flip forward to Aden, she has now got these young children in tow and they're stopped. So we have a pile of trunks, some young children,

and Duleip Singh sitting in the residency, the British residency in Aden, unable to continue his journey to India. Yeah. What happens next? No, can't go forward, won't go back, and won't go back. That's the thing. He can go back to England. He's invited to go back to England if he signs a paper saying he's going to behave himself, but he won't. And his youngest daughter, this is her first arrest, Sophia, at age nine, is sort of sitting there sweating in this heat in this place that's not designed for children for such a long time until Bamba can't take it anymore. And she says, look, please, for the children, can we do something? Just can we do something for the children, at least? I have pity. And he's, and he's, says, get out. You and them just get out my sight because I am now the implacable enemy of the British and I've got no room for you. So this is, you know, again, people who suffer trauma in childhood or, you know, can be. It's a possibility, you know, psychologists say they can, if it's a life unexamined, revisit those things on others. And that's perhaps what happens.

You know, he is a man who's been ripped away from his mother. He therefore has a really odd idea of how you treasure people who love you. And he treats them so abhorrently. Of course, I'm not saying that's the rule, but there are, some may say mitigations to his behaviour, because otherwise, how do you explain a man who just ejects his wife and these poor little children sends them back? And he sends them back with an article that he puts in the newspapers saying, extend no credit to this family, because I have no relations with Britain anymore. I am their enemy. I don't want a penny from you and just, you know, they don't speak for me. So it's such a brutal cutting off. It's a desperate story. Does Sophia ever see her father again? She will, but it will be under the most wretched circumstances.

But, you know, there she is. She's sent back with her two sisters. She has two older sisters, Bamba, named after their mother, Catherine, and two brothers as well, Victor and Freddie, who they're all sort of now at the mercy of the British state, whatever, whatever Victoria decides to do. Sophia is Victoria's goddaughter. And this is 1886. 1887? Yeah. So Victoria decides to step in and look after, you know, this child because she owes it. And the whole family, and she does like Maharani Bamba. She, you know, she thinks she's this good and pious woman. So she puts them up, first of all, in the best refugee colony ever thought of, clareges for a while. So they've put up in clareges for ages. Until she then says, okay, there must be a ward. They must be made wards and they must be looked

after and she puts them in the care of one of her equerries, Colonel Ollifant, who then looks after this family, but also spies on them regularly to see what kind of treacherous stuff Did He might be saying and sending back to the family. But Bamber, Mahorani Bamber, the mother of Sapphire, is so desperately broken by what has happened that she turns into an alcoholic. And she is drinking herself to death in Brighton under the gaze of the elephants who can do nothing about it. And the children are growing up feral. So there are all of these reports from Oliphant to Queen Victoria saying, you know, okay, Deleaps out of the picture. He barely talks to his children. I mean, Victor has reached out a few times, but it's not really, you know,

there's not really a connection at all. Two of the children are very anti-British and vocally so, Sophia's elder sister, Bamba, who now openly refers to Queen Victoria, just as her father did, is Mrs. Fagan, the receiver is stolen goods. Catherine, who cannot stand the British, and then little Sophia, who there is some hope for. So that's where they live with poor old Maharani Bamba incensate with alcohol most of the time, just trying to numb the pain. And so, you know, it's only months later where Sophia is, you know, just only been back for a little while, and she gets terrible typhus fever, which is the same thing that actually sweeps Prince Albert away eventually. But she is desperately sick and they don't think she's going to

make it. And Maharani Bamba, for the first time, sort of, you know, that feeling of being a mother is obviously with her, but she's just incapable of doing anything about it. But she sits all night by her little daughter's bed on her knees, praying to the Lord to spare her daughter. And when in the morning, Sophia opens her eyes, her fever is broken, but her mother's lying dead on the floor. She dies in the night while praying all night to save her. So she's orphaned, effectively, age 10? Yeah. Just completely without any. in the world to look out for her, look after her. Yeah, apart from Queen Victoria and the Oliphants,

who her sisters can't stand, by the way, her sisters despise the olephants. They think that they're spying on them. Queen Victoria then steps in and gives them a grace and favour flat in Hampton Court. Well, that comes a little bit later. At first she steps in because the elephants report back that these three girls in particular, and Sophia, who is sweet of nature unlike the other two,

who they describe as being awful, But Sophia's sweet, but they have no ability because their mother has been so absent from their life and given them so little training. They don't know how to eat. They don't know her to hold knives and forks. They don't know how to dress properly. They've been running around, you know, wildly sort of bringing themselves up. So Queen Victoria steps in for Sophia. She sends her dolls, which are dressed properly and T-sets to show so that through play she can learn how to be a lady.

and sends tutors to bring these girls up properly. It might be a bit late for the old two who are really wild-spirited according to the olefin letters, but at least for her, send somebody to look after them. And one of the tutors that they send from the palace is a German woman who eventually will become the lover of Catherine, and they will have a glorious lifelong love affair and completely duck out of the British system altogether.

this this storyline goes all sorts of places you don't expect it I think we probably that that sort of lesbian sort of diversion from the main thing is probably quite a good moment to take a break so welcome back to empire with me william durimple and me anita arnand just to recap what's happened to doolip sing at this point he's not we last saw him in eden where's he gone oh it all just goes completely wrong for him So he won't go back to Britain. He's completely washed his hands of his family. He ends up in France for a bit where he immediately falls into a ring of British spies who disabuse him with his wallet, his means, his money, and they put a tracker on him.

They have somebody who's sort of cozing up to him being a friend. Christy Campbell's written a very, very good book about that particular section, the Maharajas box. And he is tailed all the way to Russia where the British are watching and reporting on everything he says and does. And sadly for him, the Tsar won't see him. And so he sort of stays in this terrible guest house waiting for months and months. By now he's shacked up with one of his girlfriends because he is absolutely a philanderer who cheats on Marani Bambra any opportunity.

And this is a chamber maid from one of the hotels that he frequents. Tell me you've sold the film rights, please, immediately. Oh, yes, no, I have, I have. I have. No, it's in, as they say, development. This is war and peace, meet Sherlock Holmes, meets sort of passage to India, meets a name, Game of Thrones. It's got everything. I mean, this is such a wrong, I'm not doing justice to everything that's in the book, but, you know, there's so much that goes on. Anyway, so he's sitting in Russia.

His Cox's Bazaar chambermaid, now wife, is, because he marries as soon as Bamber draws her last breath. He has two children with her called, I mean, and this is the difference between, you know, sort of this, they're called Pauline and Irene. So Pauline and Irene are the little children who are just living this dreadful life, half sisters now, Savaya, in Russia. And the Zahar won't see them. And so, you know, he just sort of limps his way back with this now a woman who's just not interested in him because he has no money.

She's very happy to be with him while he has some cash. But when he has nothing, they go back to. Paris and he dies penniless and alone on a Parisian hotel floor. Yeah, with nobody there. Before that, though, you asked me earlier, did Sophia see him again once? So, Sophia had a beloved younger brother called Edward. And Edward is her life when they're growing up under the Oliphant's care. You know, the older sister is old enough to be sent to university. They are among some of the earlier students to go to Somerville College. In Oxford.

In Oxford. And hate every second of it. So, so Farah is alone the only person she has to love and to cherish and who truly knows her is Edward. But then Edward gets typhoid and dies. As well. And so that's the last time she sees her father when he comes to see Edward on his dying bed and is weeping and broken by the side of the bed. And then he just leaves.

And that's it. That's the last time she'll see him. him. And the next time she'll hear about him is he's dead on the Parisian floor. So she's lost both parents now. So where is she living? Who's keeping her together? So the elephants take care of her until she reaches the age of maturity. And at the age of 17, it is customary for girls, gals, nice gals, to come out in public. They debut in public. And Queen Victoria hasn't taken the slightest bit of interest in the older children, the older girls who, you know, they can't stand her and she can't stand them. But for Sapphire, she must have a proper debut. And so she debuts at Buckingham Palace itself. A proper debutante.

A proper debutante. And the two sisters are thrown in. You know, it's thrown in just, I suppose, it's economical to do it altogether. But, you know, these things, these debuts are so that women can be presented to court and presented to suitors. And the problem with these three girls is that they are too white to marry a brown man and too brown to marry a white man. but you see a picture of them in the book. I'm looking at it now. Isn't it odd?

And there's three most beautiful girls in the world. They're all wearing wedding dresses. They're wearing wedding dresses. Yeah, in veils. You know, that was the debut outfit, you know, elaborate ostrich feathers in your hair and pearls. And it looks like something from a Tolstoy novel. They've got these sort of late Victorian,

very sort of beautiful silk gowns. They've all got enormous bouquets in their hands. They're wearing necklaces of pearls. and diamonds, they've got enormous rings in their ears, but they're brown faces. They look as if they are from some sort of picture of Tsarist Russia to my eyes, but the faces are entirely Indian and very beautiful and very striking and very strong. I mean, all three of them are beauties. I mean, the thing that's weird, to me, they look like those seaside cutouts where you put your face through because the faces just don't match the outfits at all. Yeah. But it's a wonderful

picture. So this, it says Princess Bamba, Catherine and Sophia Dulip Singh at their debut at Buckingham Palace, 1894. So this is, this is, you know, this for Sapphire is a wonderful occasion and she's worked really hard to bring herself up to scratch for this debut. She's nervous about it, but she, she has worked hard. For the other two, they could not care less. They absolutely loathe everything about it and they only do it for Sophia's sake. They love their little sister very, very much. These three are very, very close. But they know that it's not going to open any doors for them because they are pretty anti-British. But for Sophia, she will spend the next 10 years of her life becoming the most pointless person on the planet, as far as I'm concerned. She goes to every party.

She revels in her new status as being this sort of pin-up for the newly created women's magazines are just coming out at about this time. the late 1890s. Lots of pictures of her surrounded by animals in your book. Her hounds and kennels. Well, because she wins crafts. She wins what is the sort of, you know, the predecessor to crafts, what will become crafts with, she breeds either teeny tiny dogs or very, very big dogs.

So it's like Pomeranians or Bozoys and she has a huge amount of success with them. She also gets into newspapers and magazines for being an exceptional horsewoman, very good rider. She scandalises the public in a way that delights her because she rides. she's one of the first women to ride a bicycle in public at a time when that wasn't acceptable. And she smokes. And she went through her receipts, William, and it was just glorious because there was this box at the British Library, which hadn't really been touched. And the amount this woman spent on importing Fabina Talc and these very extraordinarily expensive cigarettes from Egypt and Cairo was hilarious. And you just sort of got a picture of somebody who was, you know, really quite.

I was like a Kardashian of a fair day is the way I've put it before, but really who reveled in it, reveled in that kind of attention. And the first photograph in your book taken in 1900 has this incredibly glamorous picture of a dressed in a sort of, is it a sari or is it both a dress and Asari? It's not quite a conventional sari, is it? It's an approximation as close as they could get to a sari. But at that point, I think that's a really important picture. Because you look's very beautiful of it. Hung with pearls. Hung with jewels and all the kind of glories of the of the sea.

treasuries seem to be hanging around her. The jewels actually, the jewels that didn't belong to her father because they were all taken, but they're the jewels of Rani Jindon, who we mentioned in the Coenor chapter. Ranjit Singh's last wife, yeah. Rajit Singh's last wife, her grandmother, who sneaked out some of the jewels, which came to her. Otherwise, none of those jewels would have come to her at all.

And these are no small jewels. These are enormous, gorgeous, Mughal style, bracelets, bazoubuns, armlets, and a sort of one-de-old. wonderful sort of almost a tiara of pearls hanging around her forehead. It's just beautiful. But she puts on her Indianness like a fancy dress costume at that time because she doesn't feel Indian.

You know, she doesn't speak the language. She doesn't know anything really. I mean, she knows the stories about Jinden and she knows the stories about Lahore from her father when they were very small. But, you know, that's been a long time ago. And she feels utterly British. And she feels very loyal. So Catherine often cautions her that, you know, why?

Because Catherine's about to leave with Lena Schaefer, the tutor and go and live a lovely life until old age and castle in Germany. But before she goes, she says, you know what, Saf, they call her Sab, Saf, you cannot trust these people. You cannot trust these people. They've done so much harm to us. And Bambo is just, what she says is just so filled with venom that it's, you know, just not even recorded in Savaya's diary. But she argues with her sister and says, you can't, you can't judge people like that. You cannot just write off a people. like that. And Sophia's quite comfortable. But then something happens, which changes everything. This is the Delhi Derbar of 1903. So the Delhi Darbar is the party. And for party girl,

it girl, Sophia to leap sing, it is the thing that she has to go to because everybody's going. Every single person she knows is going. Anyone is anyone is going. Every Maharaja, every noab, every minor takur, everyone is going to go to Delhi and see this extraordinary sort of mock muggle derba. And London's going to empty out for it. I mean, everybody's beating a path to go and find a place under canvas from London as well. So all of the people that she socialises with. And she's this, you know, she's still styled Princess Sophia. And they know that she's the Maharaja's daughter.

But they can't go. They don't get an invitation. So Bamba, who is the really feisty older sister, she's not having this. And she regularly goes to war with the government about everything, including, you know, where they sit in the chapel, the royal chapel. she is what we'd call a green ink letter writer. So she writes and she writes saying, you know, what about our invitation? Where's our invitation?

Can we have an invitation? Where's our invitation? And everyone ignores them, just completely ignores them. It's understood that the boys can't go. They are banned from going lest they stir up some kind of rebellion. But no one's really thought about the girls. So no one just bothers to answer them until this letter writing gets to such an irritating level that the Secretary of State for India says, oh, it's a bit late now.

Sorry, just found your letters, your six million letters. But it's a bit late. We can't really arrange for the kind of protocols that would be needed to welcome you sufficiently. So sorry about that. Something tells me this isn't going to put them off. No. They are brilliant because they go, oh, it's far from being despondent. They say, well, he didn't say no.

He just said, not yet. So let's go. And they go on different ships. In disguise? No, I mean, I think they were down on their names are down. But they, you know, they were so thought to be so unimportant. and nobody really took any notice. And so they sort of, they pitch up in India.

They go to Lahore. For the older girls, it confirms everything that they already knew. For Sophia, this is a huge awakening because she sees everything that her father lost. She also sees, you know, statues to her godmother, Queen Victoria, but nothing to her father, nothing to her grandfather. And for the first time she faces racism, because she might be the big I am in London. It's nothing. She's another brown face in India.

This is a very common thing, isn't it? And Gandhi gets this, that Indians are very rare in Britain at this point and have a sort of exotic value. And also the British in Britain are quite excited by this. But the colonial British, whether it's in South Africa or whether it's in India, are steeped in imperial racism. So you get Gandhi who's lorded in London and made a great fuss of and seen as this very exciting figure arrives in South Africa. and he's thrown out of a first-class carriage at Peter Maritzburg, similarly with Sophia. Oh, she and her sister are treated abysmally on a train where they have a first-class ticket, and, you know, they're allowed to travel on a first-class train,

and yet the guard doesn't believe that they should be where they are, and treats them with an appalling disregard, which, you know, Bamber says that's just par for the course. She's the first one out to India, but Sophia just finds it hideous. And while they're also in India, something else very amazing happens. that she gets a political conscience. She suddenly sees people starving. This is on the back of another failed harvest. So she sees people emaciated with hunger.

She travels through Punjab, which is the very thing that the British didn't want them to do. And she sees people throwing themselves at her feet when they hear who she is, that she's the Maharaja's daughter, that she's Ranjit Singh's cub. She's the granddaughter of the lion of Punjab. And they keep telling her, you know, tell us what to do.

Tell us what to do. You just tell us anything and we'll do it for you. We'll rise up. You just tell us what to do. And she's so astonished by this. She says, why do they care? Why do they care so much? And she hears this other voice.

She falls in with the nationalists as well. Her sister is quite openly anti-Britishman Rai, who's a very important early nationalists. And Gopal Khashnikl, who we've spoken about a lot in relation. He turns up as well. He's the person that connects Jinnah and Gandhi and Sophia. And everybody else. So there is a momentous talk. that is going on in Lahore,

Gopo Gwasheng Gorkle, who we've spoken up before, who is the mild-mannered, let's not use violence to get the British to give us some of our powers back, nationalist leader. And then you've got Lala Lajbeth Rai, who also has the name given to him, the Lion of Punjab.

First time after Ranjit Singh, someone is deemed worthy of that title, and it's Lajbeth Rai, who says, by force, if necessary, get them out. So these two have fallen out, these two nationalist leaders, have fallen out bitterly.

And for the first time, they are going to do a speech together in Lahore. And the girls happen to be there. So they are desperate to go and listen to it. You know, it's all, it's going to be a thing. It's going to be a thing. Everyone's buzzing in the city. This is going to be a massive thing. And they turn up and to Sophia's horror, you know how they still do it to you.

VIPs in India are usher to the front and put on the stage. I mean, it seems like a great honor. It's a worst place to sit because you can't hear anything or see anything. but everyone can see you. So they're ushered to the front. And they see this momentous thing where first Gourclair does his speech and then Lala Lajbethrae does his absolute firebrand speech

and it breaks Sapphire. She suddenly understands, you know, what has been done to these people and how angry they are and how, you know, the injustice. And she writes about it for the first time I know, how did I not know any of this? So just like her father,

it's a trajectory starting off very much in by Queen Victoria, brought inside, given presence, given love. And then suddenly something happens in middle life. And she begins to change. Every thing of her life changes from this point. And because of her, it's a really amazing thing that Gopal-Khashnagli and Lala Lajbethrae both go and see her together. They go and see her together in Lahore saying we just need to see the lion's child and pay our respects. And she throws a perda party in.

Shalimar Garden. She gets the Shalemar Garden. She blocks it all off so that she can throw a party. I mean, you know, so they still are recorded this enormous status in Lahore, where they are the royal family. Anyway, so from having some sort of fall in love with Lajbeth Rai and the nationalist who are shouting again and again, Avazdo, give us a voice, give us a voice in politics, give us a voice, give us a voice. It's on the voyage home that she hears in a telegram that Lala Lajbeth Rai has been arrested and beaten and put in prison. And it is on that voyage that she suddenly turns

from somebody who loved being part of Britain to somebody who then says, you are my foes, you are my enemies, you are the monsters, I hate you. And she comes back to Britain. Unlike her father, though, that doesn't last very long.

For her father, it consumes him and it leaves him dead on the floor of a hotel. But for Sophia, it lasts as long as she, the voyage lasts, and she comes back to Britain, and then she hears that same voice of ours thought in English. Give us a voice, give us a voice,

but it's coming from the suffragettes. And she suddenly feels at home. She's got a cause now. Just before we go plunge down into the suffragettes rabbit hole, let's just finish up the national story. So in 2009, she's actually present at the farewell party for Gandhi.

Gandhi, as a young man, a lawyer in London, is leaving for South Africa. Yeah. So she's there. She's like the where's Wally of historical narrative. It was getting a bit beyond a joke at one point. I just thought she cannot possibly be there. And then you'd find like supporting evidence.

Oh, no, no, no, she was there too. Yeah. I mean. Do we know how she heard of Gandhi or who could have touched in Gandhi? What frustrating thing is is that she was the repository for her family's letters. So we have all of the family's letters, but her letters are all lost. So we don't know what she said about that particular day. We also know that she met through Athia Hussain, who was a great travel writer, if anyone's sort of interested in another great woman of Pakistani heritage.

Adi Hussain met her as well. But we only know about that because we've got Athia Hussain's writings, but we lost hers. So that's a deep frustration. Anyone listening to this who's got some letters in their attic, just, you know, get in touch. Hold on to them. Yeah. So the last phase of her life, 1909, 1910, she joins what will become the Sopragettes. So they're not called that yet, I don't think.

Yeah. So there's already a split in approach. The WSPU of Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett, the suffragists who are much more about political negotiation and putting political pressure on the powers that be to get women a vote. And Emily and Pankhurst, who are fed up of asking nicely. And Sophia throws herself into the more militant wing. So first of all, she starts by fundraising for them.

You know, so giving a great deal of money herself, whatever she has for a stigend. Gives a trap. Gives a horse and cart to... Horse and cart, because that would be useful. But also, you know, she said starts... And Emmeline very quickly realizes that this is a... This is a propaganda bomb. Victoria's now not on the throne at this time. It's Edward, who's on the throne, her son.

But she realizes to have Queen Victoria's godchild who lives at Hampton Court Palace. One thing I skipped over is that Queen Victoria, after their debut in Buckingham Palace, wants to look after Sophia. So it gives her a grace and favour at Hampton Court. She lives at Hampton Court. Bizarly, around other people who have grace and favour apartments who all were awarded them for the work they did against the Indians during the mutiny. So she's surrounded by people. No wonder, Bamba and Catherine want to peel their skin off, but Sufax, quite happy to be in these places. But for the others, they're surrounded by people who hate them. Anyway, flash forward. Inverted commas, heroes of the mutiny.

Indeed. Indeed. And that really bugs them. And this is the point where we have this picture that started you on your journey. She goes outside Habda Court. She starts selling suffragette. To deliberately embarrass them. Yeah. And actually, you know, the suffragettes, you know, in time, sort of after 1911, 1912, are becoming stepping up their actions and becoming more and more militant. They're setting fire to things. They're setting fire to trains. They bomb Lloyd George's summer house.

they are threatening to slash portraits and pictures and set fire to things. So the whole, you know, the picture gallery at Hampton Court has closed down. All the cafes and things are now losing trade because people aren't coming to Hampton Court in numbers. And they have this woman to look at every day and blame. Does she care? No. She drives press carts through London. This is a thing that the suffragettes used to do, which was for, again, press attention.

To drive these carts and sell the suffragette newspaper and they would park up at places like Drury Lane, where they would be pelted with bottles, you know, the slightly, you know, well-oiled folk men who came out from the theatres. And they would have standoffs and they would do it on purpose to get attention. Sapphire not only went on these press cart drives, she drove the carts. So there are pictures in the book of her again in her minks and her ridiculous hats, driving a press card through London. She gives very good hat. So all this reaches a climax on the 18th of November, 1910, when the suffragettes march on Parliament. Yeah, so this is known as Black Friday now.

Before Black Friday used to mean a pointless rush to the shops to get Cup Prize high-fires, it actually meant something. Black Friday was the closest that women had got to getting the vote in Britain. And there was a bill that was passing through Parliament. The Prime Minister at the time was a man called Asquith, who was very liberal in so many ways. but in this had a blind spot. He thought that if women got the vote, the conservatives would always be in power, that they were by nature conservatives,

so did not want to give them the vote. And so he cuts the time this bill has to pass. And so he's basically suffocating it in its cradle. And Emmeline and her suffragettes, the WSP, get to hear about this a few days before it happens, and they call an extraordinary meeting at the Albert Hall. And she says, this is what I think is going to happen. And if it does, we are going to march on Parliament,

and we are going to hammer down the Senate. the door and we are going to make ask with explain himself to us. Who is with me? And this place is filled to the rafters with the rafters with. And the cries go, I am with you, I am with you, I am with you. And one of the first to stand up is Sophia, who is now, you know, one of their rock star suffragettes. So there is an ordinance because the Home Secretary at the time, a man you might have heard of heard of, called Winston Churchill. Never heard of him. Never heard of him. Whatever, whatever happened to him. You have to go and listen to the rest of history. be dear. Yes, they've done a very good one on the young, young Winston. But anyway, there's a slightly

older Winston, Winston 2.0. And he's decided that he's sick of these women clogging up the judicial system and the courts. So he's passing this ordinance that if they march on mass, they can just be arrested and picked up so they can't clog things up with their protests and shut down roads and just make a nuisance of themselves. So women in groups of more than 12 are not allowed to march. So what Emmeline does is she calls another meeting at Caxton Hall and she says on this Black Friday and she says, right, we are going to march in groups of 12 at five to ten minutes intervals. So they can't pick us up until we get there and then we're all there together and we will tear the place apart. And the first group she takes are the rock stars.

So it's her. It is Derinda Nelligan who is an absolute pioneer in girls' education in in this country. Ada Wright is not in the first group, but the right Honourable Avelina Haverfield is, who is riding a horse with a whip and a gun in her pocket. She's absolutely known and has been arrested. These women have been arrested numerous times. There is Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain's first woman doctor and first woman mayor is in this group. There is Mrs. Saul Solomon, who's married to a great statesman from the Cape who is there. And they are marching in the group and as they march and the place by the way Parliament Square which I know very very well is filled with people because this is pre-TV so you know you want to get your jollies

you go out in person and the sufferer always flag what they're going to do in the papers before so they say they're going to do this tear the place apart and so the place is just filled with bystanders and also policemen in plain clothes and also people from an American ship sailors from an American ship who've just on shore leave and they want to see what happens you know so the place is So the crowd's part for Emmeline and her group, and they get to St. Stephen's Gate, and they think, well, this is going well, we're fine. And then they are what we would call kettled by the gate. What does that mean? It means that a line of police officers stand in front of them, so they can't move and they are pinned to the gate. They can't go forward. They can't go back. And they are forced to watch as group after group of suffragettes arrives. And then they are just set upon by police on horses with buttons, by plainclothes, police officers, and by members of the public. So they are, you know, women are picked up and thrown into crowds saying, do what you want to these. In your wonderful book, there is a front page of the Daily Mirror where there's a photograph over the whole of the front page. And it says violent scenes at

Westminster where many suffragettes were arrested while trying to force their way into the House of Commons. And you've got a woman on the ground, Ada Wright, as a friend. And there are kind of three plainclothes policemen, a guy in the top hat, standing over her, maybe kicking her. I think the policeman's kicking her by the look of it. And it's, yeah, it's violence. It's real mob violence. It's state-sanctioned violence. Because, you know, the directive has come out that don't arrest them, just tire them out.

So there are police officers who are meant to be, you know, sort of custodians of law and order, who are picking up women and slamming them against walls and against the tarmac and against the pavement, I should say. And the whole idea is that they'll get tired and walk away. Well, these are suffragettes. You don't mess with suffragettes because they don't go away. They don't back down. They get up again. And then they're thrown down again, and they get up again.

And Sophia, who is, by the way, I'm no giant, I'm five foot two. I've got pretty small hands, but her hands are small of the mine, and I know this because I've tried on her gloves. I mean, she's tiny. She manages, she's watching by the gate, and Emmeline is screaming at the gate, just arrest them, just arrest them, arrest them, for God's sake, arrest them. But there are no arrest, and they're just watching this carnage. Sexual violence is a real thing this day, where women's clothes are being ripped, the hands are going up skirts. You know, the kind of testimony I've gone through, it's horrible. and it's one of the worst parts of researching this book. I found it deeply upsetting.

Anyway, Emmeline is screaming. The others are screaming. They can't get out. But Little Sapphire is small enough to get through the kettle. And she is driven out into this mob. Ducks underneath the arms of the policeman. Yeah. And it's because she sees this woman who she does not know who's being repeatedly slammed against the floor. And she shoves her tiny little self in between this police officer and this woman and body checks him off. and for him, you know, it's like swathing a fly, but he knows her, because this is a woman who's been in all the magazines and the newspapers. It is like having, you know, if not Kate Middleton, Pippa Middleton, springing up in a riot.

You know her. Or Megan Markle. Or Megan Markle. Yeah, I mean, you know her. So this police officer drops the woman and tries to disappear in the crowd. Now, most of us would think, hey, we won that, not Sophia. She chases him down in through the mob going, show me your number, because the policeman covered up their numbers.

And so, you know, you have to have your numbers on your epaulets. She's like, show me your number. Show me your number. It's only when she gets the number of E-700 that she then backs up. She's buffeted and boffeted around like all the women. The women are then finally, after five and a half hours, roughly, of fighting with the police and, you know, bystands. And by the way, all the MPs are kind of like hanging out of the windows and on the railings, watching. So finally arrest are made, but no one is charged because having this testimony go through the courts will be.

be a nightmare. Sapphire pursues a case against V-700, not because of anything that happens to her or anyone who hits her, but because of this one suffragette. In the end, I saw this one piece of paper, you know, the moment when you get chills, when you found something. And it just, it was her escalating the matter and not giving up and it just letter after letter. And then suddenly there was this thing. And you can see the pressure of the pencil, send no more reply to her. And it was signed W.S.C. Winston, Spencer, Churchill. And I thought, oh, she got up everyone's nose. That's amazing. And she does get up everyone says, George Fis says, have we no hold on her? And she tries to throw herself under Asquith's car. Yeah. Yeah, she tries to throw herself at the car of the prime minister.

She numerous times tries to get arrested. She gets picked up, but she gets, but she never gets to have a moment in prison and do the hunger strike, which is what she really wants, like her sister suffragettes. And then war breaks out. And most of the suffragettes put down their rocks, put down their weapons, and they get behind the war effort. And never was that true for Sophia, you know, despite everything that's happened, she gets behind the war effort. And she raises money for Indian troops who are among the first to be sent out to the trenches because they don't have the right boots and coats. But she also goes to work in Brighton as a nurse to nurse the broken bodies that are coming back from the front. And then this is the weirdest stories because she's such a film star.

So these sort of like Punjabi, a lot of Punjabi soldiers wake up in these hospitals and they open their eyes. And they see first of all the first woman they've seen for ages and the first brown woman they've seen for ages. And then they find out she's the Rundjit Singh granddaughter. They think they're high on opium and they beg her for some proof because their family won't believe them. Somehow she managed to procure hundreds of tiny ivory mirrors and signs them like a film star saying, no, it was me. You know, I was here. And there are pictures in your book, extraordinary pictures of one-legged, wounded, Sikh soldiers with their turbans on early versions of wheelchairs and sort of reclining sofas on the lawns of the Brighton pavilion. And indeed, the Brighton Pavilion itself filled with, filled with starched bed sheets and lines of neatly arranged beds with all the patients arranged, arranged almost on parade inside the Brighton Pavilion.

It's an extraordinary time And it's a time when she You know puts ego to one side and rolls up her sleeves And tries to help She's always, she becomes this woman who just always tries to help Which is why I just have so much respect for her And what's sad Raising money for warm clothes and huts for Indian soldiers in the trenches

She tries to get the Metropolitan Police Lend her an elephant from London Zoo So she can march her down Oxford Street And collect money for them She's like bonkers. But she also does this one sad thing while she's treating, as a nurse, treating the Indian soldiers, is that she has to, she doesn't speak her own language. So she has to talk to the white nurses who have come back from the Raj and say,

can you translate this for me? And can they translate it back? Because she doesn't even speak her own language, which is painful. There's a very poignant note in the last chapter of your book when you talk about her who's who entry in 1934. and she just has one interest she puts. Just one line, the advancement of women. So that's her final cause. I mean, there's so much more, and her story ends in sadness,

but I'll just, I mean, just leave you with this. She never has a family, even though she is completely loving and giving. But after, it's actually sort of, you know, World War I, she loses her direction after the war because, you know, the suffragette battle is one, I suppose. It's in 1928 there is the representation of women. They're allowed to vote. But it's World War II that, again, gives her what she has never had, which is a family.

She takes an evacuey children and she looks after them and she becomes a mother to them. That's her first time of feeding maternal. And the reason I know all of this, as much as I know, I mean, the smell of her, the look of her. And this is just how I always like to end this. It's because I spoke to people who knew her. I spoke to the evacuee children. I spoke to the goddaughter. I spoke to the maid who worked for her at Hampton Court.

And that is how close that history is a time, a time when women didn't have the vote, a time when they had to fight like that for the vote here in Britain. As I said at the beginning, the extraordinary way that the story connects things that we think of as almost ancient history, like the Second Anglo-Sikh War and Chilean Wallabar, all those enormous battles and the Coenor,

in 1849 coming to England, all that sort of thing. And then at the end of her story, you're meeting people who actually knew her. Yeah. It's that recent. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, she died sadly, you know, sort of in Pen in Buckinghamshire. She didn't have enough money to heat Faraday House her place in Hampton Court anymore. So she lived a quiet life.

But she was remembered with so much love by the people I spoke to. So, you know, a real hero, I think. Oh, what a wonderful book. I'm just going to end this by saying anyone that's listening to this, please go out now and buy Sophia Princess Suffragette Revolutionary by Anita Anand, which is the most wonderful and extraordinary and unlikely story you will read ever. It's an extraordinary. Well, it's been a pleasure being a guest on your podcast. Thank you, Anita. From me, William Durham Pull.

And from me to me. Anita Arnaud.