James Pattle (1775-1845)

James Pattle Judge High Court Appeal, born 31 December 1775, at Beauleah, Bengal, died in 1845 at Calcutta, the son of a director of the East India Company, 1787-1795 Thomas Pattle, and his wife, Sarah Haslesby. James married Adeline De L'Tang. As Virginia Woolf wrote, James Pattle's body is said to have been sealed in a cask of rum for transport for his burial for "family reasons" at Camberwell in London. He wished to be buried besides his mother.
(Some of this information comes from reports on a talk by Prof Joan Stevens as noted below).

James Pattle's father applied for a Bengal cadet writership for him in 1791 after his education by Daniel Duff, writer (lawyer), MA of Battersea. Pattle became a senior member in India of the Board of Revenue and a judge of the Court of Appeal at Mursedabad. With 53 years' service, Pattle became "one of the longest-serving East India Company men". He began his service in 1792 in Bengal, where he'd been born, as a writer before moving to other legal posts. At one time he lived in Garden Reach overlooking the Hooghly River. James Pattle was known as "a drunkard and a liar", renowned for extravagant wickedness, known as "King of Liars", or "Jim Blazes". By repute, he drank himself to death by 1845. A story has been told, "VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE CASK OF RUM" by Prof. Joan Stevens, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.

"In my last talk, I traced the connections between Edward Jerningham Wakefield, son of Gibbon Wakefield, and various families who had served with the old East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. One of these was the family to which his mother belonged, Pattle. Jerningham Wakefield's grandfather was Thomas Charles Pattle. Now Thomas had a brother, James, who had seven beautiful daughters. James Pattle had married a French girl, daughter of the Chevalier de L'Etang, one of Queen Marie Antoinette's pages. After the Queen's execution, he and his young wife were banished. They went to British India, where their one daughter married James Pattle. All the family became friends of the Thackerays, with whom there remained ties for the rest of their lives. As a young man in London in the 1830s and 1840s, the novelist William Thackeray was constantly in Pattle company, while he and his parents when in France kept up with old Madame de L'Etang in her widowhood, as well as with her daughter Mrs. James Pattle. As for the Pattle daughters, "they possessed", as a descendant, wrote "great beauty and vivid personality".

"However, before I tell you tales of the seven beautiful daughters, I must say more about their father. James Pattle, nicknamed "Jim Blazes".

"Let me quote, first, the words of his great grandchild Virginia Woolf. "He was a gentleman of marked, but doubtful reputation who, after living a riotous life and earning the title of "the biggest liar in India", finally drank himself to death and was consigned to a cask of rum to await shipment to England." Here I interpolate, that the reason for the cast of rum was a bet. The cask story is best told in the breathless prose of young Kate Stanley, later to be the mother of Bertrand Russell, in a letter of 1860, where she repeats what she was just heard at Mrs. Carlyle's. As both accounts are needed to give you the picture, I shall thread them together. Here is young Kate, then. "Mr. Pattle once made a bet with a man that he would be buried in England - he lived in India - it was for �100, and this man said he would never live to go back to England. Mr. Pattle did die in India but, in his will, he said he only left his fortune to his wife on condition he was buried in England in the Churchyard he named -- so though it was very inconvenient -- Mrs. Pattle was obliged to go to the trouble and expense of doing it or else she could not have the fortune, so Mr. Pattle was put in a cask with spirits to preserve him and embalmed.

"Here I must pause, to return to Virginia Woolf's narrative. She, at least, uses commas... "The cask was stood outside the widow's bedroom door", she writes, "In the middle of the night, Mrs. Pattle heard a violent explosion, rushed out; and found her husband, having burst the lid of his coffin, bolt upright, menacing her in death as he had menaced her in life." They put the cask on a ship for England but, when the sailors found out what was in it, says Kate Stanley, they "positively refused to go on with it and said they would throw it overboard or come back to Calcutta; so, as the Captain thought Mrs. Pattle would rather not have it thrown overboard, he had brought it back to her."

"Mrs. Pattle then chartered a ship herself, but this too returned, baffled by a "great storm of thunder and lightning". Next, she put the cask inside a large wooden case and tried a third time. Ill with nervous strain, quite understandably, she then went to the seaside for a holiday. I quote young Kate Stanley again. "When she had been there two days, a frightful storm arose. Wind and rain and thunder, and the sea was in a great state; and a ship near the shore was in great distress. It struck and was quite wrecked, and every soul on board perished. What next morning, among the debris, should Mrs. Pattle find washed on shore to the foot of her house but a large case at once recognized as Mr. Pattle's tomb. So the cask was again taken out and put in a spare room in their house. Soon after, in the middle of the night, a great noise was heard as if the roof was coming down. Mrs. Pattle, running upstairs with the key of the room where Mr. Pattle was kept, opened it; and what should she see but the cask lid off and Mr. Pattle sitting up in the cask half out like a jack-in-the-box. She was so frightened, she fell ill and they gave up sending Mr. Pattle to England. The gas had generated and burst the cask."

"Well, it's a wonderful story, you'll agree. Virginia Woolf summed it all up by reporting "That Pattle had been such a scamp, the devil wouldn't let him go out of India." If James Pattle brought a liar's imagination and unconquerable vitality to the marriage, his French wife brought great beauty, which all the daughters but one inherited. Let me now tell you more about them. Remember, they are the cousins of Eliza Pattle, the wife of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. The eldest was Mia, who married Dr. John Jackson.

Sources http://navrangindia.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/james-patttle-english-j...

===============

James Pattle , Known as Jeremy Blazes. From "The footnote on page 218 by Raleigh Trevelyan in The Golden Oriole pub OUP 1988" .... was 'a gentleman of marked, but doubtful, reputation, who after living a riotous life and earning the title of "The biggest liar in India", finally drank himself to death'. The Pattles lived at Garden Reach overlooking the Hoogly. Thomas Pattle.- Writer 1765 (the same year as Sylhet Thackaray); married Sarah Hasleby at Cossimbazar on June 10, 1770. In 1774 he was recommended by Hastings for Council at Dacca. The most famous member of the family of James Pattle who came out as a writer in 1790 and died in Calcutta on September 4, 1845, at the age of 69 after serving for nearly 55 years. There is a monument to him and his wife Adeline (daughter of Chevalier de L'etang) in St. John's Church. (See Cotton, Calcutta Old and New, pp. 509-510).