In Search of Black Rock: History in and of the Andaman Islands

The India Office Records of the British Library in London hold a set of brown boxes catalogued as MSS Eur F388. They are part of the unusually rich and wide textual, visual and material archive of one colonial family, the Warnefords-cum-Nightingales. The boxes contain hundreds of items of correspondence between the Reverend Thomas L.J. Warneford and his daughter Alice Maude, written during the period 1875-82.1 In 1866, Warneford had been appointed chaplain to the troops in the Indian Presidency of Bengal, and from there he had been posted to the Andaman Islands. He lived in Port Blair for almost a decade with his wife Charlotte and their two children Reginald (Reggie) and Alice (known as Maude or Maud). Following the death of their mother in 1874, Warneford sent Reggie and Maude to the English county of Berkshire to live with one the Reverend Buckley. He stayed in the Andamans until the end of 1878, served in the Second Afghan War (1878-80), and then in Calcutta. Reggie and Maude returned to India in 1880 and 1884 respectively, whilst Warneford went back to England. He became vicar of St Cuthbert’s, in the town of Satley, County Durham, in 1889. By this time, he had clocked up over twenty years of Indian service.