Lunch with Lord Scarborough
By G.S. Aujla

MY friend Martin Davies, Deputy Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police was pleased to tell me that following my brief appearance at a Rotarian function at Sheffield recently, Lord Scarborough, the Lord Lieutenant of South Yorkshire and Lady Scarborough were delighted to invite me to their estate for lunch. It was an extremely welcome invitation as much for where it came from as for the manner in which the ground was laid for it when Lord Scarborough, without any formal introduction, walked up to me to say that he had a deep connection with India. He was obviously keen to talk more but due to the crowd, the conversation could not go beyond the preliminaries.

On the appointed day, Martin Davies drove me to the sprawling 5000-acre Sandbeck Park, Rotherham, for lunch with the 12th Earl of Scarborough and Lady Scarborough, some twelve miles outside of Sheffield.

Born on December 5, 1932, in the house of Sir Roger Lumley, he was educated at Eton and Cambridge and spent a large part of his holidays in India. His father Sir Roger Lumley was the Governor of Bombay (as the Maharashtra province was then called) between 1937-43. Lord Richard Aldred remembered the long voyage he undertook to India as also the royal eclat of his father’s gubernatorial assignment. As a child of seven he took great pride in posing in his father’s Indian bodyguards’ dress for a painting. This oil on canvas still proudly adorns the mantelpiece of one of the chambers of his sprawling mansion.

I patiently went through the Lord’s scrapbook with him. Among the press cuttings and photographs I saw a newspaper cutting about the inauguration of the Brabourne Cricket Stadium by his father in Bombay and the original copy of the letter of resignation of the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra B.G. Kher at the start of World War II in 1939.

India and Bombay of those days comes alive in these black and white photographs. A picture of bodyguards at his father’s Bombay residence was displayed prominently in his gallery. Commenting on it the Lord qualified, "Before my father came to Bombay the entire band of guards were

Sikhs. My father instructed that half of them should be Marathas". He was apparently hinting that the fact of having a contingent of Sikhs to guard the Governor of Bombay was a little difficult for the martial Marathas of Western India to accept for long.

Asked about his favourite pastime the Lord replied: "Farming and hunting".

He breeds pheasants and grouse in the farm by the hundreds. They provide him with an exciting outdoor activity. "He breeds them and shoots them", says my friend Martin Davies, and then hastens to clarify, "but only in the hunting season". The Lord’s farm provides excellent breeding ground for these birds to grow in spite of being hunted from time to time. At the end of the day one finds the Lord more of a conservationist than a hunter.

Lunch with the Lord and Lady was a simple four-course affair. Accompanied by a dash of vin de rouge, it was marked by the warmth of a personalised service. Lady Elizabeth Ramsay who is the lady in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II, personally carved the chicken for the main course. "I am very bad at carving", apologised the lady, presuming that she was cutting the slices too thin. As opposed to the usual practice in India, there was no retinue of servants in the house. Only one apprentice made his appearance and the Lord admitted that he was everything rolled into one — "a cook, a driver and personal assistant". The Lord and Lady though certainly not in the prime of youth manage their affairs themselves.

At lunch time, Earl of Scarborough narrated two interesting anecdotes of his visit to India in 1983. Among other places, he visited the Railway Museum at New Delhi and was struck by the fact that a railway engine had been named after his father, Sir Roger Lumley, which he himself had flagged off at the age of seven at Bombay. "When I told the curator of the museum that I had flagged off the engine, he laughed at me, thinking that I was deranged".

Recounting another memorable event, Sir Lumley narrated an incident at Agra. "Having hired a taxi when I reached my hotel I found that my wallet with all its contents was missing". As it was a Sunday, he was at the mercy of the hotel for providing him at that he needed. "On the following day there was a knock at 7 a.m. at my door lo and behold! the same taxi driver had come to return my wallet to me! The wallet had fallen through the back seat and hence the driver had not been able see it at a cursory glance. It was only when he was going to clean the taxi on Monday morning that he found the wallet. The wallet contained 1000 Swiss francs, apart from plastic money. It shows that poverty and honesty are not strange bedfellows".

While we were driving out of the Sandbeck Park we were greeted by two pheasants, one of them sitting on a stone wall — a very unusual perch for a wild bird. I took out my camera to take a photograph. The bird did not move. It just proved my point that the park was a happy habitat for birds rather than a hunting ground.