For anyone who has been watching Dan Snow’s latest BBC Documentary,The Birth of Empire-the East India Company, the name of Robert Clive crops up a lot.
Clive engineered British rule in India, fighting several key battles with the French for control of trade in the sub-continent. The results of his endeavors was that he helped cement the economic power that allowed the British Empire to grow.
What you may not have realized is that the young Clive spent his early childhood in Manchester, an upbringing that May have shaped his future character and career.
Clive was born in 1725 at Styche Hall, near the Shropshire town of Market Drayton.His father Richard, was a lawyer and a former MP, whose fortunes were declining fast. Styche Hall was falling down, and Robert, one of thirteen children was sent away at the age of three to live with relatives in the then small market town of Manchester.
What had brought him there was his mother’s side of the family.Rebecca was the daughter of Nathaniel Gaskell, a lawyer, and her sister had married into the family of Daniel Bayley, deputy lieutenant of Lancashire, of Hope Hall in Salford and it was to this uncle that the young Robert was sent and brought up as a son.
Clive would later write, on his arrival in India, of the pleasant memories of his time there, ” the centre of all his wishes” and ” a place which if he should be so blessed to revisit it, all that he could hope or desire would be represented in one view”
On his seventh birthday Daniel Bayley would write to Clive’s father of his sons addiction to fighting and his preference for out of doors activities
He would stay with the family until the age of eleven, returning to Market Drayton temperamental, impatient, and aggressive, and to many of his biographers these character traits were later to define his career as a soldier and statesman.
But at the time, the eleven year old was described as an uncontrollable tearaway who terrorised the people of Market Drayton, and who was only sent to India to get him out of the way.Many colorful tales circulate of his adventures, which include setting up a protection racket in the town and being expelled from numerous schools
It seemed clear that his father believed that he could never follow in his own footsteps as a provincial lawyer. Instead, a place was found for him in the service of the East India Company and in December 1742 Clive was appointed to serve as a clerk or ‘writer’ at the Company’s trading station and fort at Madras.
Hope Hall no longer exists, the brick-built house with a double bay set in grounds, possibly with a small park to the west, was to the north of Broom House Lane (later Eccles Old Road). Pleasure grounds around the house were surrounded by a wooded area with a path system linking the house and its associated buildings.
Clive’s story was the tale of the rise of Britain’s imperial power, taking the lead in early actions as the British and the French jostled for power in India in the 1850’s, returning a hero, marrying and living in a fine London house whilst being feted with gifts and adulation from the East Indian Company.
He would return to India in 1756 in the middle of a crisis, Calcutta captured by the Nawab of Bengal, and capturing 146 Britons imprisoning them in the infamous Black Hole from which just 23 of them survived.
Clive quickly re-took the city and then inflicted a decisive defeat on the Nawab’s army with a force of just three thousand men against the Nawab’s 68,000-strong French-backed army.
He was handsomely rewarded for his actions, would become an MP and a Lord but became embroiled in controversy over accepting payments from Indian leaders. He was exonerated by a Parliamentary enquiry and returned to public life. However he would die at the age of forty nine in what was most probably suicide, though with the stigma associated with it, it was hushed up by his family.
He left behind an immense legacy, having almost single-handedly secured the beginning of the British Empire.
