Colonel Walter Andrew Gale

Colonel Walter Andrew Gale (1855-1924), Royal Engineer and pioneer British Esperantist

David Gibbins

My great-great grandfather, Walter Andrew Gale, always seemed to me the quintessential Victorian - soldier, engineer, colonial administrator, educator, scholar, determined Anglican, fan of Sir Walter Scott's novels. I felt close to him through my grandfather, Lawrance Wilfrid Gibbins, who had lived with his grandfather as a child, had remembered his fantastic stamp collection, being dandled on his friend Lord Kitchener's knee when he had visited, crossing the U-boat infested Irish Sea to visit his grandfather in Dublin during the First World War. As a boy I had developed a fascination with Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great's expedition to the 'Great Game' of the British Raj, and was thrilled to discover that my great-great grandfather had once been in charge of the province of Baluchistan on the Afghan border. Years later I visited the Oriental and India Office in the British Library and spent days poring over the Madras Military Proceedings, trying to piece together his involvement in the long-forgotten Rumpa Rebellion, mentioned below. Most recently I have tried to find out more about his involvement with Esperanto - perhaps his most significant achievement, and certainly one whose legacy he would have wanted to endure.

Walter Andrew Gale was born in 1855 in Mozuffeepore, in the Bihar region of Bengal, where his father owned the largest indigo plantation in India. His grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel John Littledale Gale, Bengal Army, had been the first of his family to arrive in India, in 1804, along with his Portuguese Jewish wife Rebecca Brandon. During the 18th century the Gales had been sea-captains and merchants, but sought their fortune to the west rather than the east – one of Gale’s ancestors became a prominent tobacco planter in Maryland and Virginia, where his brother married Mildred Washington, widowed grandmother of George Washington.

Following boarding school at Malvern College in England, Walter Andrew Gale passed with high grades into the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and then spent two years at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham. At this period, the Royal Engineers attracted many men who today would be scientists and explorers, as well as civil engineers – the pages of the Professional Papers, which Gale edited from 1889 to 1894, are full of learned articles by officers ranging from geology and archaeology to all manner of experimental science, as well as engineering and military matters. Officers on foreign service also had to devote much time to learning languages, a matter of considerable bearing on Gale’s later interests. He himself held a number of academic appointments, as lecturer in surveying at the School of Military Engineering, Secretary of the R.E. Institute and Principal of Thomason Engineering College, India – later the University of Roorkee – and along the way completed a number of scholarly works, including an edited history of the Franco-Prussian War.

As an army officer on active service in India Gale played his part in the ‘Great Game’, the endless conflict along the north-west frontier which served as a buffer zone against Russia. As a colonel in 1905-7 he was commander, Royal Engineers, 4th (Quetta) Division and 3rd (Lahore) Division, Indian Army. At Quetta he was also supervising engineer and secretary for public works in the province of Baluchistan, the volatile mountainous region along the Afghan frontier which continues to harbour Pashtun warlords today. Years earlier as a lieutenant in the Madras Sappers and Miners he had experienced conflict of a different kind, as part of a brigade-sized expedition sent in 1879 to quell a major uprising among the tribal peoples of Rumpa district in central India, where human sacrifice was practiced. Over 18 months, the sappers built roads, policed villages and fought skirmishes in the jungle with the rebels. The deployment was thankless and protracted, failing to solve the main grievances over liquor tax and forest rights, and the force was devastated by disease. The only happy outcome was that veterans were treated by an army surgeon who went on to discover the cause of malaria – Ronald Ross, later Nobel Laureate, who himself traveled to the jungle to collect the mosquitoes which he had identified as the main culprit.

A constructed universal language would have had many attractions to an officer of Gale’s experience. Not only were there language problems within the Indian Army, which was made up of many different ethnic groups, but also uprisings such as the Rumpa rebellion were fuelled by communication difficulties. Esperanto had gained a rapid following in Britain after its inventor Dr Ludwig Zamenhof published the first grammar in 1887, and Gale joined the British Esperanto Association on his retirement to England in 1907. Contrary to popular belief, the early proponents of Esperanto did not see it as a replacement for ethnic languages, but rather as an ‘auxiliary’ or second language to be learned at school, an attainable possibility of huge practical potential. Gale devoted much of the remainder of his life to this cause, punctuated by re-employment during the First World War, when his friend Lord Kitchener – a fellow Royal Engineer – put him in charge of the Ordnance Survey offices in Dublin, where he was one of the senior British officers present in the aftermath of the 1916 rising. He had already published an Old Testament concordance in Esperanto, under the pen name ‘Uago’, and after the war produced many other works. He was frequent benefactor, and on his death in 1924 he left a considerable part of the fortune he had inherited from his father to the Association.

His father-in-law, Captain Tom Gordon, 14th Light Dragoons, ‘chased the Afghans up the Khyber’ following the Punjab War of 1848-9, and later fought in the Indian Mutiny. Gale’s son Henry also served along the Afghan frontier, becoming a brigade commander in the Indian Army mountain artillery in the 1930s. Gale’s elder daughter Helen married Arthur Everett Gibbins, architect, cousin of the economic historian Henry de Beltgens Gibbins. Walter Andrew Gale was great-great grandfather of the author David Gibbins.

Bibliography of Walter Andrew Gale:

Gale, W.A. (ed.), 1889-94. Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers. Chatham: Royal Engineers Institute Occasional Papers, Vols XIV-XIX.

Gale, W.A. (ed), 1894. The Franco-German War, 1870-71 (translated from the original German of J. Sheibert by Major and Mrs J.A. Ferrier).Chatham: Royal Engineers Institute.

Gale, W.A. (as Uago), 1910. Konkordanco de la Sentencoj de Salomono. London: Stead.

Also:

Gibbins, David. ‘Human sacrifice in the Madras jungle: Royal Engineers and the Rumpa Rebellion, 1879-81.’ Illustrated article submitted for publication.

Illustrations:

Lieutenant W.A. Gale, R.E., on his commissioning from the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1875.

Colonel W.A. Gale, R.E. (rtd), c. 1920.

Books edited with prefaces by Gale: Sheibert’s Franco-German War, and two volumes of the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers. The Waverly Novels are from a subscription library of 25 volumes, signed and dated by Gale between 1887 and 1889.

A brass ‘knuckle-duster’ brought back by Gale from India, though perhaps originally from China. The aperture for the knife blade can be seen. Length 30 cm, width across face 11 cm.

A Khond tribesman in full war regalia, typical of the jungle tribesmen Gale confronted during the Rumpa Rebellion in central India in 1879-81. This picture dates to that period, and may be from the Rumpa region. The Khond practiced meriah, human sacrifice, including the sacrifice of police captives taken during the conflict, and were armed with matchlock muskets as well as the bows and poison arrows seen here.

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