A COLOURFUL FATHER

Major Robert Gill, from a hand-coloured magic lantern slide

William John Gill was the second child of Major Robert Gill whose life could hardly have contrasted more with that of his father, a London stockbroker.

At the age of 19, Robert Gill was appointed to the newly formed 44th regiment of the Madras Native Infantry (M.N.I.). He was promoted Lieutenant two years later but had to wait another 14 years before making Captain. When he was 36, he returned to England on furlough (leave) to marry 24-year-old Frances Flowerdew Rickerby at St. Luke’s church, Chelsea. After a three-month voyage from Portsmouth on the 'Seringpatam', the couple arrived at Madras in September 1841. Their first child, Frances, was born there the following summer. William was the Gill’s first son and came into the world on 10th September 1843. He was born at Bangalore, which had become a British administrative centre a dozen years earlier. Three more siblings followed. The first was Rose, who died in infancy. Then there were Robert and Lucy Annie, both born at Jalna, a city 200 miles inland from Bombay.

Robert Gill in the rock-carved temples of Ajanta

In 1845, Captain Gill was appointed by the Court of Directors of the East India Company to 'make drawings of the fast perishing Frescoes of Ajunta, before decay and the recklessness of Tourists had entirely obliterated them' — as James Fergusson put it in the preface to his book The Rock-Cut Temples of India. These frescoes were in caves cut into the walls of a ravine near Ajanta, 50 miles north of Jalna and on the opposite side of the mountains known as the Ajanta Range. Situated near the site of Wellington’s victory in 1803 over the Marathas at Assaye, Ajanta was a picturesque little town at the head of the ravine. Robert Gill based himself in the local palace, the Bara Durree, which had been used as a field hospital during the battle of Assaye. Gill’s copies of the Ajanta frescoes were highly regarded and he was praised for his competence, artistic skill, truthfulness and fidelity. His work was exhibited in the Indian Court of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, until destroyed by fire in the late 1860s.

The Bara Durree at Ajanta, home of Major Robert Gill who took these photographs

Seven years after his civil appointment to Ajanta, and three years after the birth of his last child by Frances, Captain Gill was invalided out of the 44th M.N.I. He was only 47 and was thereafter carried on the 2nd Native Veterans Battalion. Whatever his health problems, they do not seem to have inconvenienced him too much. He continued to spend most of his time at Ajanta, hunting and taking photographs, and was even promoted Major.

In spring 1863, Robert Gill sent home nearly 200 stereoscopic views of Indian subjects. About half were of hunting scenes, views of Indian life, Muslim architecture and the scenery around Ajanta. The rest were of rock-cut temples. Stereoscopic photography was then a relatively new art: The London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company had been established 13 years earlier and it was only four years since the London publisher Simpkin put out a booklet entitled How to Take Stereoscopic Pictures, by W. Ackland.

In 1864, two books of Gill’s photographs were published in London. Cundall, Downes, & Company of New Bond Street, London, issued One Hundred Stereoscopic Illustrations of Architecture and Natural History in Western India, photographed by Major Gill and described by James Fergusson, F.R.S., M.R.A.S. A smaller volume was published by John Murray of Albemarle Street: The Rock-Cut Temples of India, 'illustrated by seventy-four photographs taken on the spot by Major Gill', again with descriptions by the architect James Fergusson.

It seems that Major Gill kept a mistress called Anne at Ajanta, said to have been of Spanish descent, although she may have been Anglo-Indian or Sindhi. About 1866, Anne gave birth to Gill’s daughter, Mildred Mary Gill, this author’s great-grandmother. Major Robert Gill died 13 years later of fever and exhaustion. He was said to have been 67 years old but was in reality 74. He was buried at Bhusawal some 35 miles north of Ajanta in 1879.