Walk Four - Ross-on-Wye, Brampton Abbotts and Backney
The image at the top of the page shows the Hereford, Ross and Gloucester line nearing the mid-point on the left bank of The Wye.
From Backney to Bengal
In February 1946, 17 guns thundered a salute from Calcutta’s colossal Fort William to herald the appointment of the new Governor of Bengal. The newcomer was a big, broad-shouldered Englishman in his mid-fifties who liked nothing more than a chat and an occasional pint of beer in his local pub. Sir Frederick John Burrows lived at Thrushes Nest, overlooking the river in Ross-on-Wye.
As a youth Fred joined the army, was transferred to the reserve, and started as a porter at Ross railway station. He was called up in 1915 and fought at Loos and on the Somme with the Fourth Battalion of the Grenadier Guards. Demobilised in 1919, as a company Quartermaster Sergeant, he was mentioned in despatches and awarded the Meritorious Service Medal.
After the Great War, Burrows went back to the Great Western Railway where he earned just under £5 a week as a checker at the Backney Halt railway siding. In his early thirties, he became an active trade unionist. In 1942 he was elected president of the National Union of Railwaymen and to the national executive of the Labour Party; then, in 1945 Winston Churchill picked him as one of the three members of the Soulbury Commission to investigate the constitutional reform of Ceylon. When after so much achievement, it seemed that he would still go back to his checker’s job two miles upstream from home, the appointment in Bengal and a knighthood came along.
The new sidings for wife Dora and two children were to be quite a contrast to Thrushes Nest. Government House in Calcutta was one of the British Empire’s most magnificent mansions, a palatial building, approached through great wrought-iron gates. On a salary of £9,600 with £38,000 a year expenses, Sir Frederick was to be attended by four aides-de-camp and several secretaries. Scores of magnificently arrayed Indian servants who had served for many years like their forefathers before them completed the panoply of tradition and ceremony.
Alluding to his humble beginnings on the railway, the amiable Sir Frederick endeared himself to the citizens of Calcutta in one of his first speeches saying, “Unlike my predecessors, I have devoted more of my life to shunting and hooting than hunting and shooting.” In the capital, his leadership qualities were soon put to the test by a lengthy spell of Hindu-Muslim civil strife. In his dealings with Mahatma Gandhi, the “Father of the Indian Nation”, Burrows commented in 1947 that “I am very relieved he has now left Bengal because it has taken 20 of my best police to look after him; so much for the image that ‘Mr Gandhi walks alone’”.
Sir Frederick was to be the last Governor of Bengal because in the same year the British Raj came to an end with the partition of India and Pakistan. Following his distinguished administration in India, where he was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal, Burrows was happy to make his home again at Thrushes Nest perched above the “Rope Walk”. The old Burrows family home now wears the badge of a blue plaque in Fred’s honour. The platform for our easy town and country walk to Backney Halt is the bandstand in Wye Street. We join the straight, wheelchair-friendly route where ropes were dried after they had been made until the early part of the nineteen century.
Though his public service continued as a magistrate and Deputy Lieutenant of Herefordshire, it is as just plain “Fred”, that the railwayman with the ruddy complexion is affectionately remembered. He passed away in 1973.