2 Dorset Place Tunbridge Wells | Sept. 3d.
My dear Mr. Tyndall
We hope you may be able to come to us on Saturday week the 12.th inst. It will be a great pleasure to us to see you and I feel that we can make you comfortable here even if the weather should be less fine then we have hitherto had it.
Walter2 sends you his love and begs to assure you that you ‘need not have irons on your shoes for the rocks are the easiest things in the world’!
It was amusing to see how the exaggerated view of them suggested by your letter3 immediately reduced his own imagination on the subject.
My youngest4 is just passing through the first troublesome event of life— vaccination, and my eldest5 yesterday underwent that of a more advanced existence in parting with us to return to school. —
I trust that you have no friends in India for it is enough to know of the dark horrors of the scene there, without the additional pangs of anxious friendship. —
It is suggested, and the suggestion seems only too reasonable, that the peculiar atrocities of this war6 have been committed by the advice of the Hindoo priests with a view to making a reconcilement between their people and ours, a total impossibility and of preserving by this means their own threatened religion and their own influence.
—For ourselves, we have the comfort of knowing my husband’s Brother Richard7 to be in the undisturbed district—the Punjaub8—but that security cannot take from us the calamitous sense of the suffering elsewhere. —
I respect the man who had the courage to shoot his wife and his child with his own hand to rescue them from torture.9 —
Yours most truly | Juliet Pollock
RI MS JT/1/P/194
RI MS JT/1/TYP/6/1918
[1857]: the year is given by the reference to the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Walter: Walter Pollock.
your letter: letter 1424.
my youngest: Maurice Pollock.
my eldest: Frederick Pollock.
the peculiar atrocities of this war: the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when mutinous native Indian soldiers (sepoys) of the British East India Company unsuccessfully fought against the company’s control of India. The rebellion led to the restructuring of Indian rule under the British Empire.
my husband’s Brother Richard: Frederick Richard Pollock (1827–99), William Frederick Pollock’s younger brother and Major-General in the British Army who served in India. Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage, 1903 (London: Dean & Son, 1903), p. 492.
the Punjaub: Punjab, a region in northern India (and now Pakistan) that was annexed by the British in 1849.
the man who had the courage… rescue them from torture: during the rebellion, British men, women, and children were targeted and killed by the mutinous native Indian soldiers.
Please cite as “Tyndall1430,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on